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PARIS AS IT IS. 



PARIS AS IT IS 



AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT OF 
ITS PEOPLE, ITS HOME LIFE, 
AND ITS PLACES OF INTEREST 



KATHARINE DE FOREST 

1fllu6tratc& 







NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. 

1900 



1 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED, 

,, afffce of tfeg. 



56612 



Copyright, 1900, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & Co. 



SECOND COPY, 



l^/BlANCHARDHg 
ird PRESS A^, 









\^ 



O O . 



Preface, 



The writer of this book is an American who 
exiled herself from her country, not by in- 
tention; for chance sent her to Paris and 
fetters of business kept her there. Her ex- 
patriation found comfort, however, in an un- 
usual privilege of contact with many phases 
of French life; which, beholding with two 
pairs of eyes, she has sought to translate into 
philosophy. For, indeed, the Old World is 
in many respects terra incognita to the New. 
The tourist knits his brows in passing like a 
pilgrim under the dull eyes of the Sphinx. 
Here, for instance, is a country which for 
some hundreds of years has kept a certain 
number of its citizens set apart, starred, 
medalled and uniformed as immortals — how 
shall that be interpreted at the beginning of 
the twentieth century? Old art and literature, 
old temples and monuments, old customs and 
traditions, have these a message to neolog- 
ists? Do they rest on eternal principles and 



vi PRE FA CE. 

speak of unchanging truths? This book is 
perhaps less a guide-book than a dream- 
book. Certainly it was written, not so much 
to give information, as to interpret the genius 
of Paris. Nevertheless its facts are from in- 
side, reliable and in large part inaccessible 
sources. Thanks are due in particular to M. 
Andre Saglio, of the Beaux Arts, for many 
suggestive facts, especially in regard to the 
French movement in art. 



Contents, 



PART I.— THE LIFE AND PEOPLE. 

The Charm of Paris 3 

The Academie Fran^aise and the Other 

Academies 14 

The Comedie Fran^aise 35 

French Homes 55 

The Latin Quarter 72 

The Men of Letters 83 

The Restaurants 109 

The Great Shops 128 

PART IL— THE RULERS OF PARIS. 

The Chamber of Deputies 141 

The Elysee 158 

In the Ministries 173 

PART III.— THE ART LIFE AND ITS 
INSTITUTIONS. 

The Museum of Cluny 191 

The Little Museums 205 

Les Invalides 214 

The Mode 219 

The Studios 229 

Notre Dame 261 

The Commerce of Art in Paris .... 267 



List of Ilhtstrations, 

A General View of Paris from the 

T ^ , • , • FACING 

Louvre, rroiitispiece. page 

Sunday on the Bois du Boulogne ... 8 

Jules Claretie in His Library i8 

Ready for School 26 

Foyer of the Theatre Fran^aise ... 38 

The Theatre Francaise 38 

mounet-sully in his library 44 

Sarah Bernhardt 48 

The Elder Coquelin 52 

Cozy Corner in a French Home .... 64 

A French Home 64 

A Family Breakfast 68 

On the Street 68 

The Moulin Rouge 76 

Zola in His Study 86 

"Gyp" . 94 

Edmond Rostand in His Library .... 98 

Pierre Loti 104 

Restaurant Ledoyen 114 

Salon in the Cafe de Paris 114 

A Tramping Party of Painters 120 

The Magazin du Printemps 130 

The Bon Marche 13° 

Hall of Chamber of Deputies 152 



X LIS7^ OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

FACING 
PACK 

Decoration Over the Door of the Elysee 168 

The President's Library at the Elysee . 168 . 

Under the Eiffel Tower 178 

Place du Chatelet, Victory Fountain . 178 

First Communicants 184 

Coming Out from Mass at St. Germain 

DES Pres 184 i 

J 

Room of Francis I., Cluny Museum ... 198 

The Garden of Cluny 198 

In the Garden of the Tuileries .... 208 

The Tuileries Gardens, Rue de Rivoli Side 208 

Napoleon's Tomb at the Hotel des Inva- / 

LIDES 2\^ ' 

The Flower Market 222 

In a Fiacre 222 

Massenet at Home 232 

Bonnat's Studio 242 

Besnard in His Studio 242 

Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre . . . 252 
General View of the Louvre from the ^ 

River 252 

The Arc de Triomphe 260 ■} 

Bridge of Notre Dame 260 

One of the Gargoyles on Notre Dame . 264 

Entrance to Notre Dame 264 

The Invalides 276 < 



PART I. 
THE LIFE AND PEOPLE. 



ERRATUM. 

The copyright of the pictures reproduced 
from the photographic series "Nos Contem- 
porains chez Eux " should be credited to 
Messrs. Braun, Clement & Cie. 



The Charm of Paris, 

What is the secret of this enigmatic charm 
of Paris which, sooner or later, takes posses- 
sion of everyone? What is it about Paris which 
seizes people, envelops them, holds them, and 
often keeps them forever, even those who pro- 
fess to have the greatest lack of sympathy for 
the French? "Every man has two countries," 
said an old writer of the last century, "his 
own, and then France." And this seems to 
hold true even now of the capital. What is the 
key to this mysterious seduction? This is 
something which has intrigued and fascinated 
me from the time I first began to know the 
French capital. And now I have discovered 
that when you have solved this enigma you 
have got at one of the best means for under- 
standing the French people. 

For a long time it was instinctive to look to 
the natural beauty of Paris as one of the princi- 
pal sources of her charm, for she is singularly 
happy in her site; as Montaigne put it so pic- 
turesquely, ''Elle est grande en felicite dc son 
assiette." All her natural features combine 
to give varied artistic effects, especially the 
Seine, which traverses the city with the curve 



4 PARIS AS IT IS. 

of a bow, so that with each quay and each 
bridge the landscape becomes of an entirely 
different character. 

At the little Pont de la Tournelle, for in- 
stance, what could be of more impressive 
grandeur than the view of the old Isle de la 
Cite rising in gray walls from the very water's 
edge to meet the massive and delicate silhou- 
ette of Notre Dame? But from the Pont des 
Arts, at the foot of the town, the Island 
of the City is entirely different. It is a fan- 
tastic vessel, with the spire of Ste. Chapelle 
for a golden mast, which cleaves the Seine 
with its elongated point, green with plants 
and flowers, like a prow. 

At the Pont des Invalides the scene changes 
again. At the turn of the stream the horizon is 
bounded by the Trocadero, rising with its two 
minarets from the side of a hill, and you would 
say the river stopped there to lose itself in some 
mysterious gulf hidden in the gardens of that 
Palace of the Thousand and One Nights. Be- 
yond the Pont de Passy, near the Isle des 
Cygnes, you are in Holland. The river is a 
melancholy basin whose low, green shores are 
bordered by dark, smoking factories. Then, as 
you look of¥ and your eyes fall on the hills of 
Sevres and of Meudon outlined in soft, un- 
dulating Hues against the sky, and you seem 
to be sailing in some old French print. 

Paris is like a fruit divided into two halves 



THE CHARM OF PARIS. 5 

by the gleaming steel of the river, and over 
each half on either side rises a height which 
augments the impression of immensity. Onthe 
left bank it is the Mountain of Sainte Gene- 
vieve crowned by the Pantheon, with its belt 
of columns on which rests its enormous dome. 
On the right is the white church of the Sacre 
Coeur, gleaming on the hill of Mont Martre 
like some celestial vision. It is at its threshold, 
rather than from the EifTel Tower or any- 
where else, I think, that you get the most 
poignant impressions of Paris as a whole. It 
lies spread out before you, with its setting of 
distant hills, its swarming expanse of houses 
dominated here and there by palaces, and 
broken by the green of gardens ; and from that 
distance the sounds of the city come to you 
only as one great suppressed murmur, a mur- 
mur palpitating with the life of this great heart 
of the old world. All this natural beauty it 
is easy to recognize as one of the great advan- 
ages of Paris, but beauty counts for very 
Httle in its charm. And, indeed, my expe- 
rience is that Paris is not one of the cities 
whose beauty is spoken of as one of its con- 
spicuous features, as with Edinburgh, for in- 
stance. Most people who go there in the sum- 
mer when it is deserted are disappointed, and 
if you ask the average stranger what the attrac- 
tion of Paris is, he rarely answers its beauty, 
but always its movement, its life; by which 



6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

he generally means some such thing as sitting 
at a little table on the boulevard, or going 
about to the Bohemian resorts of Montmartre, 
most of which are entirely arrayed, he discov- 
ers later, to meet his preconceived ideals, and 
have nothing to do with the real life of Paris 
at all. 

For that matter, what can you fix upon as 
the life of this great city, where each quarter 
is, as it were, a city within a city, having its 
own particular character and its own esprit f 
It is as hard to define it as it is to analyze the 
heart of a man tossed by a thousand conflict- 
ing emotions. And yet in the heart of a tov/n, 
as in the heart of a human being, you can al- 
ways find dominant characteristics which ex- 
plain each. 

Many years ago a sentence spoken by a lit- 
tle Paris hairdresser first gave me a key to 
Paris. It was in his shop, which was one of 
those places where everything suggests tradi- 
tions and a profession which has been handed 
down from generation to generation. Over 
the deep azure gulfs formed by the large mir- 
rors in the little saloon at the back were pieces 
of old Normandy faience bearing the legend, 
*'The month begins;" rehcs of the day when a 
man's monthly account was marked by a piece 
of pottery. Two or three cupboards of old 
carved wood stood about, and in one of the 
nasturtium-framed windows a large tortoise- 



THE CHARM OF PARIS. 7 

shell cat was tranquilly sleeping. All at once, as 
the proprietor's wife was ministering to my hair 
her husband's voice floated Bharply back through 
the stillness: "Here everybody on every 
round of the ladder can get his share of Paris," 
he said. "Everybody can enjoy life." Oddly 
enough, these very same last words fell from 
the lips of the sculptor St. Gaudens a short 
time ago, as he was telling some French friends 
in a general conversation why Paris differed 
from other cities. ''A Paris les gens joiiisscnt 
de la vie," he said. I quote the French be- 
cause "joiiissent de la vie" always seems to 
me to have a little different signification from 
the English ''to enjoy life." I noticed this 
when I first went to live among French people 
through the way in which they spoke of "la 
z'ie." They gave an impression of it as some 
sort of immense outside thing forever going on 
for which you were in no way personally re- 
sponsible, but could dip down into and take 
out your share, which nevertheless must in- 
variably be paid for. ''C'est la vieT the Gen- 
eral's daughter would say lightly as she alluded 
to those maternal misfortunes in consequence 
of which I was at that moment under her roof; 
"Je paie ma douloureuse, a la desHneef 
''Oh, I would rather pay my douloureuse in that 
way than any other," I heard a charming 
youn^ French married woman say gaily to 
mx\^ Qm whQ w^^ Qondolmg with her on her 



8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

husband's loss of fortune. But once these dues 
paid to Destiny, both one and the other would 
consider that it owed her some satisfaction, and 
would distinctly include this in her scheme of 
existence. 

That a certain share of enjoyment is an 
inalienable right of man is the great under- 
lying principle of French genius, and out of 
this secret springs the charm of Paris. Else- 
where men either burn themselves out with 
work or they vegetate. It is only in Paris that 
they establish an equilibrium between effort 
and relaxation. This is the reason why the 
Parisians always get the credit of being idlers 
and loungers in spite of the fact that the output 
of production there is enormous. But from 
every effort a man looks forward to getting 
some immediate return; and, while one return 
is to come from enjoyment of Paris, some one 
must see that Paris is a place he can enjoy. 
This is at once the source of her splendor and 
her charm. In the afternoon at the stroke of 
four the house painter puts down his brush 
and the mason his trowel ; each rolls a cigarette 
and stops to drink a glass of wine. They ex- 
pect meanwhile to delight their eyes with beau- 
tiful surroundings; this need for the jouissancc 
dcs yeiix which to other nations is a luxury is 
j^ a first necessity to the French.T During a cen- 
tury and a half the Parisians of the Middle 
/Vge? imprQYJsec} for tbemselye? jnaspns ^n4 



THE CHARM OF PARIS. 9 

architects to build Notre Dame, the most beau- 
tiful church in the world. And their descend- 
ants of to-day have just forced the City Fathers 
to tear down a building worth a million of 
francs so they can look at the Hotel Cluny 
from a distance of fifty yards. A few months 
ago they obliged the city to buy for them the 
Hotel de Lauzun, a year ago the Hotel de 
Lepelletier de Saint Fargeau; every year they 
vote a large sum of money for some aesthetic 
purpose. If Paris is beautiful it is because the 
Parisians will it so. It had at its head for a 
long time, no doubt, sovereigns who loved 
splendor and lavished money on magnificent 
buildings. And, then, in the Second Empire 
and the Third Republic civil engineers at- 
tached to the Government, like Baron Hauss- 
mann and Alphaud, replaced them. But if 
these all built palaces, planted gardens, pierced 
boulevards, made splendid perspectives, it was 
only because they marched before a people 
who demanded these things to compensate 
them in their daily life of toil. 

So we find everywhere in the French 
capital the charm which comes from the 
happy mingling with taste and tact of 
those three great sources of enjoyment, 
nature, art and souvenirs. Take the Place de 
la Concorde, for instance, with its splendid 
space just accented by the obelisk and 
bronze fountain in |he centre, ^nd the staUiejj 



10 PARIS AS IT IS. 

of the cities of France sitting about in a cir- 
cle. On one side is the green of the Elysian 
Fields, and on the other that of the Tuileries 
gardens; while the twin palaces, which you 
would say made a setting for the whole, are the 
glories of the architecture of the eighteenth 
century, so exactly are they adapted by their 
proportions and their mingling of elegance and 
majesty to the place for which they are in- 
tended. As you look along the beautiful route 
of the Champs Elysees your eye falls on Na- 
poleon's triumphial arch; and then a double 
avenue leads you to the Bois de Boulogne, 
which has not only the elegance of a park for 
the rich, but that perfume of wildness which 
makes it a place where the poor spend the day 
with their children on Sundays and fete days. 
That everything in Paris is for everybody 
and everybody is apparently getting his share 
of enjoyment out of it is one secret of the uni- 
versal atmosphere of hicn-etre. Nothing is 
allowed to jar; even funerals are arranged to 
give the melancholy charm of stately cere- 
monies, if they are not looked at as fetes. 
*'A holiday for the fete of Jules Ferry" is the 
way in which I heard a little boy speak of the 
closing of school for Jules Ferry's funeral. "If 
this fine weather continues the day of the dead 
will be very gay this year," said my old bonne 
just before the ''Jour des Marts,'' She thought 
etp of clirys^nthemump ten4e4 



THE CHARM OF PARIS. ii 

by white-capped flower women sitting among 
the whirling leaves, which put color into the 
streets on that day, and all Paris in family 
groups clad in that black garb which to her 
meant holiday going about in stately fashion 
to put flowers on the tombs of its dead. Every- 
thing in Paris is consecrated by a fete. The 
Spring means the Horse Show, the flower 
show, the varnishing days of the salons, of 
flowers in the Bois and the Grand Prix. Every- 
body gets their share, for those who do not go 
in carriages pay two sous for a chair on one 
of the beautiful avenues and watch the driv- 
ing. Every day during the season they get a 
fine spectacular show in the driving between 
five and seven, out to the Allee des Acacias in 
the Bois. Everything which makes a place for 
itself in the life of Paris sooner or later fur- 
nishes an occasion for a function. The last 
new thing has been the automobile show. 
When shall we go to the varnishing day of 
our flying machines? 

The old traditions never seem to die out. 
On Twelfth Night every family that has bread 
in Paris has a galette sent to it as a present by 
its baker. The marmiton you see walking the 
street in his white dress, as the little baker's 
boys flit about in "Cyrano de Bergerac," per- 
haps carries in the basket on his head the same 
varieties of little cakes that baker's boys carried 
a century ago. Some of them have quaint old 



12 PARIS AS IT IS. 

homes which in themselves possess a charm. 
There is ''Les Puits d'Amour'' — "Wells of 
Love;" there is still the Baha, the Savarin and 
the Madeleine. In the morning you are waked 
by the old street cries. "Voici du mour-r-on 
pour les p'tits-oi-seaux'' comes in a plaintive 
minor from the merchant of bird seeds. ''Die 
from-age a la creme" is a class student note; 
while the old-clothes man seems to answer it 
antiphonally in " 'Chaud 'chaud d'hahitsJ" The 
picturesque figure in the Basque Beret selling 
goats' milk from his herd announces his pres- 
ence with a tune almost as eternal as that of 
the piper of Kant's' Grecian urn. Thus has 
he piped to his flock since the days when 
Henri of Navarre first brought some goats 
and their herder to Paris from his native 
Pyrenees. 

Study the streets of Paris if you want to un- 
derstand her, The street has always been for 
the Latins something what the market place 
was to the ancient Greeks. And, above all, 
go to the boulevard; not that great road which 
stretches from the Madeleine to the Bastille, 
but the boulevard proper, which goes from the 
Rue Royale to the Rue Drouot. Its character 
is not the same that it was ten years ago, even 
five years ago ; it changes from day to day, like 
life itself. The celebrated cafes where the men 
in the movement met, talked, discussed, cre- 
ated the atmosphere of Paris are no more. 



THE CHARM OF PARIS. 13 

They have been transformed into brasseries 
through which the world passes without stop- 
ping. There are no "boulevardiers" now. The 
boulevard is only a passage, though the most 
luxurious one in the world, like a great arcade 
through which lounge or hasten all the differ- 
ent elements of the capital; the wealthy part of 
the population coming from the Champs Ely- 
sees or the Pare Monceau entering by the 
Place de la Madeleine; the business world com- 
ing from the Bourse or the Marais by the Rue 
du Quatre Septembre, the left bank of the 
Seine by the Avenue de I'Opera, and Mont- 
martre and the Batignolles by the Rue Aubert, 
the Rue Halevy, the Rue Lafifitte, the Rue 
Drouot; all these mingled with a cosmopoli- 
tan stream from every country of the uni- 
verse. Life on the boulevard seems more in- 
tense and concentrated than elsewhere. Un- 
der your hand beats all the agitation of a peo- 
ple; you touch the pulse of the whole world. 



The Academic Francaise 

AND THE OTHER ACADEMIES. 

One of the things that dawns upon you 
more and more as you live in Paris is that 
all the places are filled. Nothing makes you 
feel this more than the Academie Frangaise. 
Not only does it contain seats for only Forty 
Immortals, and one of these must die before 
the halo of immortality can descend upon 
some one else, but when it holds its func- 
tions there are seats for only so many of the 
mortals. In other places, in proportion as 
mortals multiply on the face of the earth, new 
buildings are put up to accommodate them, 
with more seats. In Paris this is not so. The 
old gray pile of the Mazarin palace, in which 
sits the Institute, with its five Academies, has 
looked out over the Seine for three hundred 
years, and the tiny amphitheatre inside has 
grown neither larger nor smaller. So pre- 
cisely the same struggles and heart-burnings 
to enter it and be among the Immortals, and 
therefore prove the right to be considered 
of Tout-Paris, go on now that were seen a 
century ago when the Academy first began to 
sit there. ''Dear, dead women, . . . what's 

14 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 15 

become of all the gold, Used to hang and 
brush their bosoms," I thought, the first time 
I went to one of its receptions, and watched 
the file of the beautiful women of to-day 
throng into the amphitheatre in a chill, white 
atmosphere which, until it took on warmth 
and color from toilets and perfumes, you 
would say was in its very composition crystal- 
lized thought and congealed tradition. What 
has been the end of all their struggles? Who 
are the Immortals now? 

It is principally the women who keep up 
"the superstition of the Academy." This is 
another question of tradition. Long ago, 
when Voltaire was made an Academician by 
Madame de Pompadour, he said that it were 
better to be in the good graces of a King's 
mistress than to write a hundred volumes.; 
and even now when there are no more Kings, 
with their mistresses, women still have an 
influence of untold importance on an Aca- 
demic election. Mr. Howells has said that 
women make the literature in America. They 
do not make the Uterature in Paris, but they 
do hold the Salons and make the vogue with- 
out which a man is never elected an Immortal. 
His eligibility for this reposes on some such 
principle as that which governs a society mar- 
riage. Someone has defined a mesalliance as a 
marriage between two young people who are 
not accustomed to meet in the same houses. 



i6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

So, when the members of this "pleasant club 
for elderly gentlemen" find they must choose 
a new companion to whom they are to be 
united as long as they live, the principal thing 
they demand of him is that he be a person 
they are in the habit of meeting socially. 
For this reason, the simple sentence: *'I1 n'est 
pas de la societe," settles Zola's pretensions 
as an Academic candidate, as years ago the 
fact that Theophile Gautier was slovenly in 
his dress and wore his hair long, affected his. 
"I will vote for him," said Guizot sarcastically, 
of a certain individual, ''because he is polite, 
decorated and has no opinions." 

The Academy was founded at a time when 
the protection of a king or some personage 
of rank was necessary to give prestige to 
writers, and to-day it is a sort of exclusive 
club protected by the State which has nothing 
to do with the glory of French letters, and no 
influence upon them. Who make up the pres- 
ent list of the Immortals? Thirteen men who 
are really an honor to the Hterature of the 
country, seven upon whose mediocrity every- 
body is agreed, eight savants, one sculp- 
tor, an archbishop, four politicians and five 
dukes. You see in the number the sculptor 
Guillaume, the diplomat Hanotaux, the arch- 
bishop Perraud, the mathematician Bertrand, 
the ex-Ministers Freycinet and Ollivier, the 
economist Thureau Dangin; but you do not 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 17 

see the names of any such men of talent as 
Zola, the Rosny, the Marguerite brothers, 
Maurice Barres, Gebhart, Huysmans, Mistral, 
Porto Riche, de Curel, Richepin, any more 
than you saw those of Alphonse Daudet, Ver- 
laine, Flaubert, Maupassant, de Goncourt, 
Baudelaire, George Sand, Balzac, or long ago, 
Moliere. Academicians are very often not 
lettered men at all. Somebody, I do not re- 
member who, gave much entertainment to 
himself as well as to his friends by making a 
collection of autographs of the Forty in 
which there was not one that did not contain 
a mistake in spelling. "There are forty of 
them there who have the esprit of four," is a 
well-known mot. Publishers have told me that 
the famous phrase "de I'Academie Fran- 
(;aise" on the title page of a book no longer 
influences in the slightest way its sale. From 
a literary standpoint the Academy becomes 
every year more and more a tradition. 

From its social side it gains possibly in 
prestige because all the time it is growing 
richer. Before the law it is a "personalite 
civile" with the right of inheriting, and end- 
less are the legacies it receives and the prizes 
it disposes of — prizes bestowed principally 
upon the books of those men and women 
whom Academicians know. The little cabals 
and intrigues, therefore, that are always in 
solution in all society centre about an Acad- 



i8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

emician like crystals around a thread. In 
precedence he is the equal of a duke and 
higher than an archbishop. Octave Feuillet 
used to tell of the sudden change in his posi- 
tion in his own country when he became an 
Academician. Before that he was nothing 
but a writer, a man of no importance, and 
when he went to dine at the chateau, or with 
any of the great people of the neighborhood, 
he was always the last to go in to the table. 
After his election he was invariably placed 
at the right of the hostess. It is evident that 
to recognize an author only when he has re- 
ceived a sort of stamp making him ehgible 
for society cannot be a real gain to literature ; 
if it levels the distance between him and a 
duke, it establishes a factitious inequality be- 
tween him and other writers. 

But from all this it is easy to see the impor- 
tance, as a function, of a fashionable recep- 
tion at the Academy. Go just before one and 
have a talk with old M. Pingard, the head of 
the bureau of administration, son and grand- 
son of the old Messieurs Pingard, who were 
the chiefs of this bureau before him. You 
will find him sorting an apparently number- 
less collection of little violet, blue, green, 
mauve and white bits of pasteboard, and be- 
moaning his fate at being obliged to make a 
thousand of them do for the several thousand 
people who have asked for invitations. 




IT. ° 



Jz 5 



W 



u 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 19 

''Women have written me from everywhere; 
from all over Paris and the provinces," 
said M. Pingard when I saw him last. ''I have 
three hundred places in the centre which go 
by right to the most beautiful women of Paris, 
but think of all it takes for the members of 
the various Academies, to say nothing of the 
twenty for the incoming member and all those 
for the director, and for the ministries, and 
for the administrations, and for everybody. 
What am I to do with all these other women? 
I shall set their beautiful eyes to weeping, and 
I shall not even have the consolation of wip- 
ing away their tears ! And then there are the 
foreigners; the Americans, for instance, who 
have so much enterprise!" And M. Pingard 
went on to tell that one evening when he 
came in from the theatre about twelve o'clock, 
he was surprised to find drawn up before the 
door of the Institute a splendid carriage and 
pair. From it stepped a man, who said that 
he was an American and had received a card 
for the ceremony the next day. As he had 
understood it was necessary to be on hand at 
an extremely early hour in the morning in 
order to get a place, he had thought it 
simpler just to come and pass the night in the 
Court. He had pillows and food and every- 
thing that was necessary, he added. There 
was no tradition authorizing M, Pingard to 
kt any one 3l§ep all night in a carriage in the 



20 PARIS AS IT IS. 

court of the Institute, he was obliged to in- 
form the enterprising traveler. "All that is 
necessary, my dear sir, is to send a good valet 
de chambre early in the morning to hold your 
place," he added, and the discomforted Amer- 
ican drove away. He had probably heard of 
the mot of a stout gentleman who, after stand- 
ing for several hours in line on the day of a 
solemnity at the Institute, exclaimed: "Vrai- 
ment il est moins facile d'entrer ici que d'y 
elre re(;u!" 

I cannot imagine a more desolate place in 
which to pass a night. The Institute on 
ordinary occasions seems like some forgot- 
ten island in the great city, invincibly resist- 
ing the tide of advancement in ideas, modes 
and tastes which beats around it. You have 
even a material impression of this as you 
leave the elastic wooden pavement to enter 
its great, surly court, and tread upon the 
rough and unequal gres of the time of Louis 
XIV. which cover it. In one corner gigantic 
chimney pots twisting flame-like tongues of 
stone await, in order to take their places on 
the roof, some royal architect with sword 
and jabot who will never come. The very 
air there seems colder and more oppressive, 
and the rare passers-by who cut short the 
distance between the Quai Visconti and the 
Rue Mazarine by passing through the court 
hasten their $teps until at the entrance, 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 21 

near the studio of the engraver of medals, 
Chaplain, they come upon a beautiful old 
well of wrought iron, greening in summer 
with a panache of clematis, sole and unex- 
pected smile in this temple of somnolent 
austerity. 

- On a reception day a spell comes over this 
sleeping palace. By five in the morning a 
line of white-capped bonnes, blue-bloused 
commissionaires, humble folk of every con- 
dition, has begun to form before it, each 
holding a card and keeping a place for its 
owner till the doors shall open at twelve. 
On the back of these a liveried attache of 
the Academy has stamped a number; the only 
concession that the Institute will make to the 
modern demand for numbered places. The 
loungers of the Parisian crowd gather round 
them, and the special Academic beggars; for 
every Academician has his own particular 
beggar. Each adopts, as it were, an Acade- 
mician. He knows the route of his great man, 
and never fails to be in his patron's path as 
he goes to the Institute, and "to pass the 
time of day." "Ah, Monsieur; all my com- 
pliments! How finely you are looking! I 
have never seen you in more magnificent 
health." Every beggar begs of his own 
Academician, and of no one else. Never the 
mendicant of Jules Claretie will ask anything 
pf Fran^oi^ Coppee, nor the beggar of Frari- 



2 2 PARIS AS IT IS. 

^ois Coppee anything of Jules Claretie. 
"Why do you always address yourself to me 
and not to any of these other gentlemen?" 
Jules Claretie demanded one day of his 
shadow. "1 haven't the honor of their ac- 
quaintance," the man answered, with dignity. 
For many years Jules Claretie had the same 
beggar. "1 did what I could for him," said 
the famous director of the Franqais, ''and the 
only time I hesitated was when — more 
ragged than Job — he asked me to give him 
an opportunity of assisting at a spectacle he 
had never seen — a Tuesday at the Comedy 
Franqaise!" 

About half-past eleven carriages em- 
blazoned with old armorial bearings begin 
to line the quai before the Institute, and 
charmingly dressed women and distinguished 
men with red ribbons in their button-holes 
to fill the court-yard and to replace the long 
lines of waiting servants. Just as the stroke 
of twelve rings solemnly out, as it has rung 
so many time for a hundred years on such 
scenes, another Hveried attache appears at 
each of the doors with an enormous key. 
Five minutes later and every seat in the am- 
phitheatre except those in the centre reserved 
for the three hundred most beautiful women 
of Paris and its greatest celebrities, are 
filled, and then everybody sits for an hour 
waiting for the ceremoniaa to begin, 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 23 

The occasion is frigidly solemn. There is 
none of that bright gaiety about it, that air 
of a social function which hangs over first 
nights, or vanishing days, or any of the other 
gatherings of Tout-Paris. People talk in 
subdued whispers. Now and then there is a 
sort of suppressed murmur as some person- 
age Hke the Princess Mathilde, or Madame 
Aubernon, or the ''Countess Diane," or the 
beautiful Madame Gauthereau — an Ameri- 
can, by the way — enters. At last the double 
rows of soldiers outside present arms. An 
imposing old gentleman in silk knickerbock- 
ers and a gold chain throws open the central 
door, and the Academicians, one by one, 
saunter in in their green coats embroidered 
with laurel leaves in silk, bow and smile to 
their friends, and sit down on the wooden 
benches covered with faded green velvet 
which have replaced the forty arm-chairs of 
the time of Louis XIV. 

The first one of these ceremonies at which 
I ever assisted was one which, from the im- 
portance of the names interested in it, would 
have been characterized by M. Pingard as 
causing a "vrai delire." M. Andre Theuriet 
was received into the chair of M. Alexandre 
Dumas fils, and M. Paul Bourget repHed to 
his address. M. Theuriet, a genial-looking 
little man who has apotheosized the simple 
life of country towns in genre pictures like 



24 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Dutch paintings, and written charming pas- 
toral poems, read a discourse to prove that 
Alexandre Dumas fils was a precursor of 
Ibsen. That Dumas was the first person to in- 
troduce on the stage an ''idealism militant," 
was his point; a theatre full of consciences 
which sought a rule of conduct from within 
and, after finding it, opposed it to social con- 
ventions. It was a good speech and so was 
Paul Bourget's psychological exposition of 
Dumas's methods and theories which fol- 
lowed. But as I Hstened to what Aca- 
demicans made out of the two, I wondered 
whether, more than Ibsen, Alexander Dumas 
had meant to put into his pieces all that 
people got from them. Some one in Paris 
once asked Ibsen what was exactly the mean- 
ing of a certain passage in ''Solness." 'Tm 
sure I don't know," was the answer of the 
old dramatist. "I used to think that there 
were two sources from which people could 
find out what I meant in my plays, the bon 
Dieu and Ibsen. Now I've made up my mind 
that there's only one, and that's the bon 
Dieu." 

It must be a strange feeling for the other 
Immortals to listen to these discourses and 
feel that some day some one will be making of 
each of them a "final and definite portrait," 
and that there is no way of escaping from it! 
This is a melancholy sensation, I am told. 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 25 

and as to the incoming member, an unbroken 
chain of testimony goes to estabHsh the fact 
that assuming this sort of immortaHty, gives 
a man one of the worst quarters of an hour 
of his Hfe. Thiers, when he was received, 
was Minister of the Interior, and at such a 
height of political glory that he considered it 
beneath his dignity to make the traditional 
visits to the members to ask for their votes, 
and simply informed them of the honor 
he was disposed to confer upon the Academy 
in consenting to be elected. And yet he told 
Sardou that he had never known stage-fright 
in his life but once, and that was when he got 
up to read his speech. 

We all know Emerson's remark upon the 
inward tranquility which comes to a woman 
from the consciousness of being perfectly 
well-dressed. In the same way there is noth- 
ing that can deal such a blow to the stoutest 
masculine courage as to be obliged to stand 
up for the first time in Academic costume 
before a fashionable audience; especially 
when ''not by nature that way built," as the 
English said of Prince Henry of Battenburg 
when he donned the ''breeks and kilt." The 
Academicians seldom have the facade of what 
they represent. They are generally elected at 
an age when they are beginning to take on 
embonpoint with their fireside habits and 
slippers ; and the green coat embroidered with 



26 PARIS AS IT IS. 

laurel leaves after a design made a century 
ago by the painter David to please Napoleon, 
who loved panache as much as any boy and 
uniformed everybody around him, and the 
childish mother of pearl sword are not cal- 
culated to give ease of manner to many men, 
especially to those who have not kept young 
and slender figures. 

Think of a person like Renan in such a 
dress, a man who seemed to waddle on his 
stomach — which you saw first — and then for- 
got instantly, the moment you caught sight of 
his charming smile, full of bonhomie and in- 
dulgence. He considered himself a martyr 
to the ''habit vert," and he was the greatest 
martyr to it that ever lived. He spent 
grudgingly in the beginning the seven hun- 
dred and fifty francs for a complete outfit, and 
fancied that was the end of it. This was 
reckoning literally without his host. No 
sooner had he taken his seat than he began 
to grow stout, and he continued to increase 
in size with alarming rapidity. Each time he 
took out his embroidered coat and tried to 
put it on it seemed to have shrunk. At last 
he could just squeeze himself into it, but 
could no longer move his arms, and he sug- 
gested some enormous turtle, who, to keep 
his equilibrium, had been stood upon his hind 
legs. The tailor was sent for, for the twen- 
tieth time, but could do nothing more. The 




Ready foi* School 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 27 

only thing, he said, was to order a new gar- 
ment. The great philosopher did not propose 
to be daunted by a mere coat. *'I say, my 
friend," he said to the tailor, with that 
winning charm which never failed to gain his 
audience, 'like Berenger, I love my old coat. 
It would be a real grief for me to separate 
myself from it. You are a man of talent who 
knows all the secrets of his art. Would it not 
be possible to make some clever arrangement 
of this costume so as to give it back the ele- 
gance it has lost?" The tailor let himself be 
convinced, and accomplished miracles. Gores 
and biases were introduced into the back of 
M. Renan. The man of talent pieced out the 
linings, inflated the sleeves, lengthened the 
tails, changed the course of the embroideries. 
And M. Renan had the supreme satisfaction 
of dying without having been obliged to re- 
new his Academic outfit. 

The trials of Academicians must have been 
much greater in the old days when they 
wore their dress into society. Ampere, the 
famous chemist, used to tell an excellent 
story upon himself in this connection. He 
had gone to a soiree to lecture upon a subject 
very near his heart, and had so warmed up 
with his own eloquence as entirely to forget 
his surroundings. All at once a sudden con- 
sciousness of reality rushed over him, and 
he looked around to find, to his astonishment, 



28 PARIS AS IT IS. 

that the room was entirely empty except for 
a single person: the mistress of the house tran- 
quilly asleep on a sofa before him. The most 
delicate thing to do appeared to the Academ- 
ician to slip out quietly, without waking her, 
but as ill-luck would have it, it so happened 
that exactly between the woman's back and 
the cushion was the savant's sword, which he 
had put there so as to be more at ease while 
talking. The excellent Ampere tiptoed over 
to the sofa, and, kneeHng down, tried to with- 
draw this softly without disturbing his fair 
friend. Suddenly, to his horror, the blade 
came awa}^, while the sheath stayed, and 
meanwhile the sleeper awoke and began to 
scream loudly at seeing Ampere, the peaceful 
Ampere, on his knees before her, brandishing 
a naked sword. Everything was explained, 
but you can fancy how Paris laughed the next 
day. 

For that matter, what would she do with- 
out the perpetual chain of Academic jokes 
which has not once failed her for several hun- 
dred years? Pailleron was admitted to the 
Academy only on his play, "Le Monde ou Ton 
s'ennuie," which made people laugh over one 
of the Academic salons, Madame Aubernon 
de Nerville's; and the celebrated Renan story 
of this same house — how at dinner Madame 
de Nerville rang a little bell when an Academ- 
ician was about to speak, and how, when 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 29 

silence was made for Renan, he asked for 
some more peas — has been served up with all 
the vegetables, in all languages. 

Another house of the same sort is evi- 
dently conducted upon the same principle. 
On the mantel-piece in the dining-room is 
this inscription: *'At a repast in which Join- 
ville figured with the King St. Louis, a clerk 
spoke in a low tone to his neighbor. The 
king said to him: 'Why do you speak thus? 
Either what you say presents some interest 
and, therefore, we should all extract some 
profit from it, or it is only vain words, and 
then it were better to keep silent!' " 

Stories of the celebrated Oppert are a fruit- 
ful source of entertainment for Paris. He is 
the original of the famous scene in Anatole 
France's "Le Lys Rouge" — book with a key 
— between the philologist Schmoll, "who 
knew all the languages except the French," 
and Marmet, whose unique study was the 
Etruscan tongue, "of which neither he nor 
any one else had ever succeeded in learn- 
ing a line." The two savants perpetually 
quarrelled, and especially on the subject of 
the Latin writers, which Marmet insisted on 
quoting, and wrongly. One day they met on 
the steps of the Institute, and Schmoll put out 
his hand. 'T don't know you, sir," said Mar- 
met. "Do you take me for a Latin inscrip- 
tion, then?" retorted Schmoll. In the original 



30 PARIS AS IT IS. 

scene the mot was still more amusing, *'You 
must take me, then, for a cuneiform!" 

I myself once had the rare good fortune 
to be present at a delicious scene in an Aca- 
demic salon. It was at a soiree where one of 
the guests was a Chinese prince, in a splendid 
robe of yellow silk, and another an Academ- 
ician, as absent-minded as he was learned. I 
saw the latter overturn a jardiniere. A tre- 
mendous crash resounded through the rooms, 
and everybody, rushing to the spot from 
which it came, found the fragments of porce- 
lain lying upon the floor, the plant broken, its 
earth scattered, and, conspicuously near, two 
individuals, the absent-minded Academician 
and the Chinese in his robe of yellow silk. It 
must have been one of those moments for an 
Immortal when mortal temptations assailed 
him sorely. Only a glance, a raising of the 
eye-lids, and the brunt of that story would be 
laid forever on a Chinese robe, instead of re- 
maining as a heavy weight for Hfe in the 
baggage of an Immortal. Every man has his 
price, and this one had his. In a few mo- 
ments **C'etait le Chinois!" circulated rapidly 
through the rooms. 

These different tales have carried me quite 
out of the Academic Fran<;aise into the other 
Academies, for Oppert is a member of the 
Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
and Ampere belonged to the Academic des 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 31 

Sciences; the two Academies of which we 
hear least, and yet which are worth more 
than any of the others. If the case of the 
Institute as a government institution were to 
be plead, entirely outside of the individual 
value of any of its members, who have many 
of them rendered so much service to prog- 
ress as to be beyond criticism, it could easily 
be proved that the two branches I have just 
named, to which should be added the Acade- 
mic des Sciences morales et politiques, 
founded only fifty years ago, were of the 
greatest value and usefulness. They are socie- *" 
ties of savants renowned for their knowledge 
of science, of antiquity, and their deep re- 
searches in social and political economy. 
Simply because they are organized by the 
State, which gives them to the crowd a stupid 
air of apparently claiming to hold the mon- 
opoly of genuine science, patented, their mem- 
bers pass for being conceited and exclusive. 
As a matter of fact they are just the opposite; 
as they prove by attaching to themselves as 
corresponding members pretty much all the 
savants of the world, and in encouraging, by 
the numerous prizes of which they dispose, 
an enormous number of students whose work 
otherwise would run the risk of being refused £) 

by publishers, and remaining fruitless. 

By the side of these the Academic Fran- 
gaise, as I think I have shown, is, on the con- 



32 PARIS AS IT IS, 

trary, of no real use. I am not sure, how- 
ever, but that the great mass of the French, 
with their love for materializing things, would 
feel as though esprit and letters were dead 
unless they sometimes saw them tangibly in- 
carnated in green coats and cocked hats. 
These make an excellent efifect, too, in proces- 
sions. Some of them are always detailed for 
every official ceremony. And probably it is 
a good thing to give to forty gentlemen a 
means of never growing old by setting them 
a perpetual task which will never be finished, 
such as that of revising the French dictionary. 
It prevents them from saying with one of their 
compatriots of a certain respectable age: 
**The gout has bestowed upon me the arm- 
chair the Academy has never been willing to 
give me!" 

But the Academic des Beaux Arts as an 
institution positively does harm. In its very 
composition there is an irreparable defect. 
This is that even its youngest members are 
getting on toward sixty. It is known that 
outside of a few rare exceptions, Henner, for 
instance, or Puvis de Chavannes, who did not 
belong to the Institute, an artist loses little by 
little, with age, his power of imagination, his 
surety of hand, his clearness of vision; and 
what is more serious still, his ideal and his 
taste are always of the time when he had his 
greatest successes. So the painters, the sculp- 



THE ACADEMIE FRANCAISE. 33 

tors, the architects, the engravers, and the 
musicians of the Institute who form the 
Academic des Beaux Arts are and always will 
be twenty or thirty years behind the contem- 
porary movement in art. Instead of con- 
tributing to its progress they retard it. Not 
only do they absorb a large part of the orders 
given by the State, but they are the principal 
judges of those which are given to others. It 
is they who are the professors at the ficole 
des Beaux Arts, and finally, and above every- 
thing else, they distribute every year an 
enormous quantity of prizes in money which 
they give only to those disciples who bend 
themselves to their taste; very often, unfor- 
tunately, against all their own tendencies. 
The result of this shows itself with special 
force in the annual competitions for the Prix 
de Rome. You see there any number of 
young men who have spent their time doing 
nothing but making imitations of Bonnat, 
Bouguereau, Hebert, Laurens, Falguiere, 
Mercie, Pascal, Chaplain, Massenet, Reyer, 
simply because to compete for a prize, or, as 
it is called, ''monter en loge," will give them 
a subsidv which will let them live a whole 
year. During the last twenty years, out of all 
the laureates of this melancholy Prix de 
Rome, a single one, Besnard, after having 
his personality enslaved during the best years 
of his youth, has been able to get it back; 



34 PARIS AS IT IS. 

something indispensable for any really fine 
work of art. 

I say for twenty years, I might say for two 
hundred and fifty years, from the time that 
the Academic des Beaux Arts has existed. 
More than a century ago the great painter 
David cried to the members of the National 
Convention: ''Talents lost to posterity! Great 
men, misunderstood! I will quiet your dis- 
dained shades. Victims of Academies, you 
shall be avenged for your misfortunes. In 
the name of humanity, in the name of patriot- 
ism, by your love for art, and above all by 
your love for youth, destroy these fatal Acad- 
emies which can no longer exist under a free 
regime." 

And free America, whose youth with its 
splendid initiative has never yet known what 
it was to be enslaved and trammeled by worn- 
out traditions, would have a 'Trix de Paris!" 



The Comedie Francaise, 

"I drink to Moliere," said M. Jules Claretie 
one evening recently, ''to Moliere and his ex- 
cellent servitors. It was he who, under Louis 
XIV., through propagating socialism ob-^he 
best sort — co-operation and fraternity — 
founded this admirable house, so soHd and so 
durable. I hope that it may last as long as 
our dear France herself, for it is one of the 
jewels of the pained 

That night after the curtain was lowered on 
the performance at the Theatre Francais the 
scene-shifters drew over it, on the stage side, 
a canvas representing a scene from a salon. In 
the center they hung a portrait of Moliere. 
The stage itself was arranged as in the last act 
of the "Marriage du Figaro." At one end they 
placed the poet's bust, and before that a large 
table and five small ones, all beautifully ar- 
ranged for a supper. In the place of honor 
at the large table M. Claretie, director of the 
theatre, seated himself at one o'clock with 
the societaires and pensionnaires around him. 
There was none of that precedence on that oc- 
casion which ordinarily rules the Frangais as 
rigidly as a court. At M. Claretie's right was 

35 



36 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Mme. Baretta, the doyenne of the societaires, 
and on his left Mile. Geniat, the youngest pen- 
sionnaire. Thus, for the first time in the his- 
tor of the theatre, the whole Comedie partook 
of a real supper together on the stage in honor 
of the birthday of MoHere, and thus founded 
a new tradition in that celebrated old house. 
'T drink to the one-hundredth supper to 
Mciiere," the director said in ending his toast; 
■'"lo his house, which is also the house of Cor- 
neille, Racine and Victor Hugo; to Moliere 
and his grandchildren, and to the future of the 
Comedie Fran(;aise." 

When I think of the social life of Paris, 
Moliere's birthday parties come up to me as 
one of its features. Many a time I have helped 
at the celebration of one of these in a specially 
arranged performance at the Frangais, end- 
ing with the crowning of the poet's bust. Most 
of all, however, I think the Moliere afternoons 
on Mardi Gras delight me. The world is en 
fete, and one of the most charming things 
about it is the children at the Frangais. You 
see whole families there together, and the foyer 
between the acts is a garden of small folk, 
exquisitely mannered little creatures, conduct- 
ing themselves exactly like little men and 
women. Nowhere can you see an audience 
more finely representative of the best French 
people than at the Franc^ais on the afternoon 
of Mardi Gras. When Paris has given herself 



THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 37 

up with particular zest to the spirit of the day 
what a strange experience it is to come out 
into the bizarre carnival world; trees hung 
with long, blue, green, yellow, red and violet 
serpentine streamers, ground soft to the feet 
with multi-colored confetti, and even people 
red, blue, green, violet and yellow, in the same 
way. What if the world had been made like 
that in the beginning I have sometimes 
thought? What kind of ideas should we have 
— red, blue, green, violet and yellow? Carni- 
val is indelibly associated in my mind with the 
souvenir of Moliere. 

This theatre calls itself the House of Moliere 
and calls him its ancestor, but it really goes 
back much farther than to his day. The first 
theatre in Paris was founded not long after the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew, when a com- 
pany of strolling comedians came and estab- 
lished themselves in the old city and founded 
the Theatre du Marais. In the time of Louis 
XIV. Paris had three theatres. The grand 
monarch united the two principal companies 
and made them an ofificial troupe, ''in order," 
he said, ''that the representations of the come- 
dians might be more perfect." For a hundred 
years or so they moved about from one house 
to another. Now we find them in the Palais 
Royal, now in a tennis court standing on what 
is to-day the Passage du Pont Neuf, for twelve 
years in the Tuileries. In 1782 the troupe of 



38 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the Comedie went to the present Odeon, and 
there it stayed until the Revolution, when it 
was suppressed and its actors imprisoned. Na- 
poleon, as first consul, reorganized it, and es- 
tablished it in its present home in the Rue de 
Richelieu, where it has remained ever since. 

It was Louis XIV., we see, who was its 
actual founder. He it was who had the idea of 
making it a co-operative association, and es- 
tablishing pensions for retiring, members. On 
this is based the fundamental principle of the 
Franqais, the institution of two classes of 
actors: societaires who are co-partners with 
the theatre, have a voice in its government, in 
the choice of the plays, a share in the yearly 
profits, and retire with a pension; and pen- 
sionnaires engaged by the year at a fixed sal- 
ary, with the prospect of being elected socie- 
taires after a certain probation. This was part 
of the vast scheme of centralization of Louis 
XIV., of his plan for organizing not only the 
arts, but literature, and personifying them in 
grand institutions. But, though it is true that 
he gave the Comedie durabihty and a material 
existence, as M. Regnier, one of its historians 
and a former societaire, wrote, the great poet 
gave it his glory and his name, ''which in times 
of danger has proved more efficacious than 
contracts and regulations in protecting the 
House of Moliere." 

Even to-day it is the name of the great com- 




Foyer of the Theatre Frangais. 




The Theatre Frangais (recently burned). 



THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 39 

edian which holds the house together. The 
Comedie Frangaise, wherever it has been, has 
given a durable and stable home for two cen- 
turies to that drama for which the French 
have such a passionate love, and Moliere 
has always been the master of it. "Salue au 
Monsieur" one of my friends heard the coach- 
man of a Paris cab say, lifting his hat as he 
passed the statue of Moliere in the Rue de 
Richelieu. And he is a Monsieur to-day to all 
the citizens of France, even the humblest. He 
remains ever modern, because, while he ex- 
poses the eternal hypocrisies and stupidity of 
human nature, he so holds them up to ridicule 
that he is a perpetual solace for the pettiness 
of daily life. 

M. Claretie might have said more in his 
toast, for the Franqais is not only one of 
the jewels of France, but far more, perhaps, 
than the French themselves imagine, it seems 
to me one of the fundamental stones upon 
which rests all the real prestige of French life. 
It has a unique place in the world. Do away 
with the French opera, there would be plenty 
of places in other countries where you could 
hear good music, and good French music, just 
as well. Suppress the Louvre, yet scattered 
about in other museums would be enough 
treasures to form a collection which would 
give you exactly the same pleasure you get 
now from those in the old palace of the kings 



40 PARIS AS IT IS. 

of France. But the stage of the Comedie 
Frangaise, over which the State has so 
jealously watched for two hundred years 
and seen that three times a week at least 
were played some of the chef d'ceuvres of 
the French tongue, has an entirely dif- 
ferent place in Paris from the other the- 
atres, the museums, the art galleries, or the 
schools. It is a miisee parlant, a living history 
of French esprit, French manners, and the 
French conception of life for over two hun- 
dred years. People go there to be amused and 
are amused, and unconsciously they come 
away refreshed and stimulated by the emotions 
that have been aroused by the fine and lofty 
thought whose spell they have been under, ex- 
pressed with so much suppleness and brilliancy 
in the beautiful old tongue spoken in the 
fifteenth century by Racine, Corneille and 
Moliere. Far more than the Parisians them- 
selves imagine, especially in respect to the 
lower classes, I am satisfied that it is to this 
theatre, which is not only a museum of classic 
literature and an ever-open history, but is at 
the same time a school of manners and taste^ 
that they owe the superiority in certain direc- 
tions they have kept for so long. All the Paris- 
ians certainly do not go even once a year to 
the Franqais, but enough do go of all classes 
to make the great masters of drama, who in 
Other days were at the same time the great 



THE COMEDIE FRANCAISE. 41 

masters of thought and of the art of speaking 
well, real and popular with everyone. 

Happy the people who have the means for 
getting such a national education. Some of 
them might prefer the happiness apostrophized 
by Voltaire: ''Happy the people whose annals 
are tiresome;" and I am not sure that the Re- 
publican Government in its entirety altogether 
appreciates its singular good fortune in this 
respect. No doubt, when it comes time to vote 
the annual appropriations some of the Social- 
ist deputies grumble over that 240,000 francs 
to the Comedie Francaise, which is the only 
way of assuring the ofiftcial existence of the 
theatre and giving to the State the right to see 
that the old repertory is played so many times 
every week. As a matter of fact, no public ex- 
penditure is less of a luxury or more impor- 
tant, and this must have been the opinion of 
that great intelligence. Napoleon, when he 
sent back from the depths of Russia the laws 
which still nominally regulate the Frangais 
under the celebrated name of the ''Decree of 
Moscow.'' 

What actually governs it, however, is a mass 
of traditions and precedents. "It is like an old 
house," M. Francisque Sarcey said to me once 
in talking about it, "which holds together, no- 
body knows how. Put in one wedge and 
the whole thing will go to pieces. The di- 
rector and the actors and everybody are al- 



42 PARIS AS IT IS. 

ways differing and quarreling; but they always 
end by some sort of a compromise, and the 
theatre goes on, no one knows how. Nothing 
of the kind could ever be set up nowadays. To 
have anything like it you would have to lay 
the foundation, and then be willing to wait two 
hundred years for the result. And then, you 
see, the theatre and the Constitution developed 
simultaneously." 

What an old, old thing the drama seems, to 
be sure, the first time you go there! You feel 
as though the Greek plays, like Antigone or 
CEdipus, had simply been going on for three 
thousand years. As I enter under its dusky 
dome I always feel as though I was entering 
into the presence of the drama, something 
visible and palpable. Madame Alphonse Dau- 
det, in *'The Childhood of a Parisian," tells 
how, when she was a little girl, she used to see 
la gloire. It was in the person of a thin, slight 
old man, a general, who sat by the fireside and 
so talked of his battles and the glory of them, 
and so personified this by his personality, that 
to the child he was la gloire. At any rate, the 
Fran^ais makes the drama splendid through 
all the art treasures which its evolution had 
comprised. You see that the works of the great 
artists of all the ages give it dignity, even in 
its smallest details. Look, for instance, at the 
collection of walking sticks for the grand 
seigneurs and the petits marquis of the time of 



THE COMEDIE FRANCAISE. 43 

Moliere, dating from his day, with their han- 
dles of gold, wrought with art by the best or- 
fevres of the day, and encrusted with precious 
stones. Here is one of the first specimens of 
piano-making, in one corner of the greenroom. 
It is an old spinet, signed: "Sebastian Erard 
et Frere. Compag. Privilegiee dii Roi. Rue 
du Mail No. 2'j a Paris, 1790.'' It was a speci- 
men for a museum, and for nearly a century 
it had served in "The Barber of Seville." 

Even the bells of the theatre are celebrated. 
It was one of them which actually tolled out 
the signal for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew 
from the belfry of St. Germain TAuxerrois. Jo- 
seph Chenier secured it for the Fran(;ais, and it 
is now used to give the signal for the massacre 
in the play of Charles IX, 

The store-rooms of the old theatre, the one 
that was burned, could not contain its won- 
derful collection of beautiful Louis XIV. and 
Louis XVI. and Empire furniture, all perfect 
specimens of the very purest style, dating 
from the epoch, or the specimens of old fur- 
niture of all the styles; and they overflowed 
with marvellous tapestries and embroideries, 
with old mirrors, silver service, bronzes, clocks, 
candelabra, lamps. The Frangais had the finest 
arsenal in the world. Even the things in what 
is called "the small property room" would 
have done credit to a museum. The flower- 
pots, feather dusters, tragic and comic masks, 



44 PARIS AS IT IS. 

inkstands and other writing materials, all the 
thousand and one little things required in a 
play, were antiques, and each had its history. 

The old Frangais was crammed with art 
treasures, most of which were saved. The 
green-room and the public foyer were gal- 
leries in which you found specimens of 
all the best artists of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. The vaulted vestibule was peopled with 
statues, the staircase was lined with marble 
caryatides; in front of each of the fluted pilas- 
ters that separated the panels of the foyer was 
a pedestal holding a bust signed by a cele- 
brated name like Houdon, or Caffieri. In 
every passage and every room of the house 
there are pictures, busts, engravings, and a 
wealth of historical souvenirs. 

Long familiarity with the Franqais led 
you to mingle a certain discriminating reserve 
with the first burst of awed admiration with 
which you viewed many of these treasures. I 
could not admire the vestibule, with its Doric 
columns, nor the two great statues of Tragedy 
and Comedy which adorned it, all made in the 
Second Empire, that odious epoch of art when 
nobody could think of any other way of repre- 
senting antiquity than by a female figure wear- 
ing bandeaux of hair and a chignon. Then, 
too, the great fireplace in the public foyer was 
"pompier" — to use that invaluable slang word 
from the Paris studios used to characterize art 




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THE COMEDIE FRANCAISE. 45 

which suggests the Second Empire pictures in 
which the rnen wore helmets Hke those of the 
Paris ''pompiers," or firemen — and the ceiUng 
by Dubufe iils, a painter as uninteresting as 
he is fecundj made you think more than any- 
thing else of the salon of an enriched bour- 
geoisi But the statue of Voltaire, in the place 
of honor, at the end, was regarded one of 
the finest statues that Houdon ever made. 
And could anything be more lovely than some 
of the busts on the pedestals between the fluted 
columns, all of which were saved? The Caf- 
fieris alone are some of the most perfect gems 
of sculpture in existence. These are the 
things that make you appreciate the wonder- 
ful treasures the Comedie possesses. 

You might almost have taken for a curio 
the little man on the landing standing on 
watch over a door, as ugly as a gnome, and so 
old that he seemed to date from the creation 
of the house. He wore round his neck a 
silver chain, Hke his colleagues in the anti- 
chamber of a Ministry, and, like them, he is 
a functionary and there for life. 

On the other side of him was the mysteri- 
ous and enchanted world of the artists, for the 
drama still inhabited this old museum, and 
human beings at stated intervals moved and 
walked and talked just as human beings 
moved and walked over two hundred years 
ago, and they said the same words. 



46 PARIS AS IT IS, 

How could any actors ever live up to 
the place, and what is more, keep it alive? The 
Comedie Frangais still gives the most gener- 
ally satisfactory entertainment in the world, in 
spite of the fact that you no longer go 
there to hear the most remarkable actors 
in Paris, and you rarely find there the best 
of the new plays. Nevertheless, the old house 
was packed every night of the year, both win- 
ter and summer. That, too, in spite of the 
loss of so many great names; in spite 
of the death of Regnier, the retirement 
of Got and Le Febvre, the defection of Coque- 
lin and Sarah Bernhardt with their new 
theatres — Coquelin with the phenomenal suc- 
cess of **Cyrano" at the Porte St. Martin — of 
the retirement of Madeleine Brohan and 
Reichemberg. 

But the value of the individual actor is of 
small importance at the Comedie. Only the 
pupils who graduate with the highest honors 
from the Conservatoire are allowed to make a 
debut there, and all of these have been so 
trained that they are prepared to fit into the 
general harmony. The troupe is, and always 
will be, remarkably homogeneous in the roles 
of the ancient repertoire. It is sufficient for 
this that each member take care to respect the 
tradition which has been handed down without 
interruption from the time when the authors 
themselves lived; and whether he or she be 



THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 47 

more or less brilliant is a matter of small im- 
portance to the public who goes to listen to 
Tartuffe, les Fourberies de Scapin, Andro- 
maque, or the Cid. It is even a drawback to 
the general excellence to find an actor who as- 
serts his individuality at the expense of the en- 
semble. "M. Mounet-Sully, a little less genius, 
if you please," Emile Augier said one day at a 
rehearsal. What we particularly notice there 
is the way the geniuses play down to the medi- 
ocrities. 

All this in no way diminishes the individual 
value of the troupe. But, now that there are 
so many theatres in Paris, the fifty-two actors 
of the Comedie do not make up the half of 
those who are favorites with the public, and I 
am not at all sure that even its greatest stars 
would shine with the same brilliancy in a less 
aristocratic house, where the aim was more 
to find something new than to preserve old tra- 
ditions. Lebargy, the jeune premier^ famous 
for his cravats and his chic, the man who set 
whole torrents of printer's ink flowing simply 
with the menace to resign his position, would, 
have somewhat of a disillusioning, I fear, if he 
left and tried to dispute with Guitry the only 
place at all adapted to him, at the Vaudeville. 
Lebargy is made for the correct Lavedan of 
Catherine, or the serious Donnay of Le Torrent, 
plays written by men with visions of the Acad- 
emy in the distance. He would lack entirely 



48 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the fougue, the audacity and the passion which 
Guitry put into the Donnay of Les Amants a,nd 
rAmoureuses, or the Lavedan of Les Viveurs. 
That Guitry is going to the Frangais as soon 
as his engagement at the Vaudeville is fin- 
ished, is the most important fact of this last 
year in the theatrical world. It is an excellent 
thing for that theatre; less so, perhaps, for 
Guitry. 

Take some of the other leading actors of the 
Comedie, Hernandi Mounet-Sully, for in- 
stance, a tragedian of such remarkable power 
in CEdipe; but who can imagine him trying to 
take Antoine's place in Hauptmann's Les Tis- 
serands, or La Nouvelle Idole by Curel, the only 
pieces in which the drama is of a character suf- 
ficiently elevated for him? 

Silvain is admirable in classic tragedy, but 
this is only played now in Paris at theFrangais 
or at the Odeon, which is a sort of annex to 
the former. Coquelin cadet, and even Feraudy, 
would certainly not equal Baron and Brasseur 
in Le Vieux Marcheur or the La Dame de chez 
Maxim, at the Nouveaute or Varietes. And 
certainly, neither Bartet nor Marsy nor Ba- 
retta could rivaL Reiane, Sarah Bernhardt, 
Granier, or even Jane Hading. 

The fact that the Comedie holds its own so 
in Paris, I think, must in one way be a proof 
that this principle of general excellence is the 
real ideal of the theatre. And yet, it cannot 




c^ 



— O 
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Y. 'A 



THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 49 

be the only ideal. All the Paris theatres, the 
Vaudeville, the Gymnase, the Varietes. the 
Palais-Royal, the Renaissance, the Porte St. 
Martin, the Nouveautes, the Theatre Antoine, 
have their reason for being at a time hke this, 
when literature principally takes the form of 
the novel, and when dramatic art, secondary 
for the moment, is constantly seeking under 
the form of naturalist plays, psychological 
plays, plays with a purpose, satirical plays, so- 
cialistic plays, some final and definite form. 
The Comedie Franqaise will always be inferi- 
or in this sort of research, where each style 
monopolizes a genre. It can only accept tim- 
idly a novelty, for it has the responsibility of 
fixing what shall become classic — as the fam- 
ous dictionary of the Academicians decides 
what words shall pass into and become part 
of the language. 

It is not from this stage that will come the 
Renaissance of French dramatic art. But it 
remains the most splendid personification of 
dramatic art that can be imagined. La lit- 
terature habillee promenading about Paris in 
the person of an academician has something 
ridiculously incongruous about it, but how the 
drama lends itself to the part! You should see 
Delaunay walking across the St. Lazare rail- 
way station, on his w^ay to his home at Ver- 
sailles. All his life he has been a ''jeunf 
premier/' and now, though he is over seventy 



50 PARIS AS IT IS. 

years old and retired, he still keeps on playing 
his favorite role, with his white hair as care- 
fully dressed as though it were powdered, his 
chest thrown out and limb straightened, he is 
not exactly the Perdican or the Fortunio 
of Alfred de Musset, which once upon a time 
bored so many pretty women, but the gallant 
marechal de Richelieu of Alexandre Dumas 
pere, who only eight years ago still climbed 
lightly over the balcony of Mile, de Belle Isle. 
Such he is for those who meet him, and such 
he is for himself. In a room in his house he 
has hung all the costumes which he rendered 
illustrious; the brilliant defroques of the mar- 
quises of Moliere, and he regrets not to have 
been able to die in one of these, like Moliere 
in the robe de chambre of the Malade Imag- 
inaire, on the field of honor. 

And the charming and witty Madeleine de 
Brohan, who left the stage in the very height 
of her reputation. She gave up playing the 
roles of young girls one day when in, I don't 
remember which play, the words, "Ernestine, 
I love you," said to her brusquely, shocked her 
like an anachronism; and an incident of the 
same sort decided her to give up playing alto- 
gether. Those who see her intimately in her 
little apartment in the Rue de Rivoli, looking 
over the garden of the Tuileries, say that she 
is still the Madeleine Brohan of the old days, 
with her heart always in her theatre; and she 



THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 51 

is even to be found sitting in the same position 
that she always took in the foyer of the Come- 
die, with her work-box on a chair, whose back 
formed a sort of rampart before her, as though 
to keep off bores. Her god-child, Reichem- 
berg, the "petite doyenne," has followed her 
example, and only a year or two ago, in '98, re- 
tired also. Another Parisian event is the re- 
tirement of a societaire. That night he or she 
owns the theatre, arranges the programme 
as they please, sell the seats at any price they 
wish. For Reichemberg's soiree d'adieu, Duse 
came on from Bologna to play the last act of 
Adrienne Lecouvreur, and as distinctly a 
Parisian sight as could be imagined was the 
little doyenne's loge that night; the loge 
which was once Rachel's, with Mile. 
Reichemberg in the little gray dress and 
white guimpe she had worn as Agnes, in the 
midst of her lilacs, her camelias, her orchids, 
her ribbons, her gilded baskets, seemed, as M. 
Claretie put it, like the corolla of some gigantic 
flower herself. 

The societaries of the Francais, when they 
retire, are always sure not only of a little in- 
come, but a little capital, for only half their 
share in the profits of the theatre is paid to 
them each year. The rest is invested, and given 
them on their retirement. The singers of the 
Opera retire in the same way, and, oddly 
enough, while they have a special fancy for 



52 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the real country, like Bois-Colombes, the 
actors always choose either Versailles or even 
Neuilly or Asnieres. Evidently they are so ac- 
customed to country scenes of painted canvas 
that villas and paved streets of the environ- 
ments of Paris give them sufificiently the il- 
lusion of country. And then, they love the 
crowd, and can never bear to be shut off from 
it, or far away from that theatre which during 
all the best years of their life w^as the scene of 
their struggles and their successes. I think 
the actors of the Franqais keep the old pres- 
tige more than even rank and title nowadays. 
The foyer of the Frangais has always been 
one of the most brilliant salons in France. 
One great actress after another has held her 
court there like a sovereign. Kings, princes, 
dukes, generals, all that the world counts 
most distinguished in politics, art or letters, 
have filed through it. It has seen the ovations 
made to great dramatists after their wonderful 
successes — has seen Victor Hugo acclaimed, 
and Alexandre Dumas fits with the tears roll- 
ing down his cheeks in the midst of the wild 
enthusiasm of the first nights of Denise and 
Francillon. Times have changed. The eti- 
quette which once ruled the foyer is one of the 
things that has disappeared. In the old days, 
while you saw the actresses comfortably settled 
with their crochet or their tapestry, waiting 
till the regisscnr should come to tdl Camjlle 




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THE COMEDIE FRANC AISE. 53 

that Horace was ready to give her the fatal 
stroke of the sword, or CeHmene that the Mis- 
anthrope waited, to tell her that her co- 
quetry had determined him to leave the world, 
no visitor could appear but in a dress suit. 
Lately one of my friends tells me that he has 
seen a bicyclist in the foyer. 

The conversation is no less brilliant, how- 
ever; it is the Hg-ht banter and witty repartee of 
people accustomed to the theatre and its mots 
a eOfet. Here are a few bits which have come 
to me from time to time — women do not go 
to the foyer — trivialities, but specimens of that 
sort of quick French repartee, which is so pe- 
culiarly French: 

"Mme. X., I hear, is giving a large dinner 
this evening?" 

"Yes; I saw the oysters going in under the 
door as I came by." 

* 5ji Hi * 

''What, leaving already?" 

**Yes; I promised to go to supper with 

Sarah." 

"Oh, yes, that's so; it is Friday; voiis faites 

maigre." 

* * * * 

"Just fancy, my dear, Chevet asked me ten 
francs for a botte (bunch — boot) of aspara- 
gus!" 

"Was it wearing then a golden spur?" 

>!? 5}; * 5H 



54 PARIS AS IT IS. 

**Mlle. Chose is very hoarse to-night. The 
public scarcely applauded her at all." 

*'C' a' n'est pas juste; elk a la voix du peuple." 
* * * * 

"F. louche a la caisse quince mille francs 
pour son lever du rideau." 

"On a cu tort de lui donner tant de morpnaie 
pour une mauvaise piece!" 

^ ;[; ij: ^ 

Mile. Z., coming from her loge: "Just fancy! 
Mme. W. insisted on coming into my loge. 
She cried, 'Ouvrez, ouvrez moi done!' " "And 
then?" "And then I answered, *Do you take 
me for an oyster opener?' " 

>k ♦ >!: ^ 

In another part of the foyer Silvain talks of 
his birds, Mounet-Sully of his bicyclette, 
Rachel Boyer of her automobile, Trufifier of his 
writing — all these princes of the Comedie and 
all of these great amoiireuses of the drama are 
after all, bans bourgeois. 



French Homes, 

It is not an easy thing to generalize about 
homes anywhere, but one general statement 
can certainly be m.ade of those in France; 
they are what the foreigner knows the least 
about of anything in the country. The French 
have a great love for home, even though, as we 
are fond of saying, they have no such word in 
their language. "Foyer" replaces it, but you 
never hear them talk familiarly about their 
foyers. They say, ''Je vais a la maison" — 'T 
am going to the house," and they speak of 
their "interiors," but neither of these expres- 
sions is the equivalent of our word home. 

I always think perhaps they have no satis- 
factory word for it because no one word could 
ever express all the conditions which the idea 
must contain to them. They seem to put into 
it some of the literal feeling that an old col- 
ored mammy I once knew had when she found 
out what 1-o-v-e spelled. "Mighty poah way to 
spell love,'cordin's I knows it," she said; "on'y 
just foah letters!" The English idea of home 
is an abstraction, and almost any symbol would 
express it. They can take out a tea kettle at 
five o'clock in the afternoon in any spot of the 

55 



56 PARIS AS IT IS. 

globe where they may happen to be, and as 
they watch the steam mount from this emblem 
of their altars and their fires, it is a little Britain 
and it is home. But home to the French is 
something concrete and material. It is some 
particular spot in some particular house, in 
which are installed the exact traditions at- 
tached to their idea of their own partic- 
ular family. They are devoted to this. They 
never want to leave it, and when they go away 
in the summer it is always to set up somewhere 
just such another home, exactly like the one 
they have left. You rarely find the best French 
people in hotels or boarding-houses. The re- 
sponsibility of keeping up these particular tra- 
ditions is probably one reason why they put a 
little sort of Chinese wall around their interiors, 
within which the foreigner is rarely invited. 
These homes must not be modified nor dis- 
turbed by the profane touch. 

This explains the fact that we know so little 
about French life. Paris is a city within 
a city, one of which is real and the 
other artificial. Its show places, its show 
dressmakers, half its life, exist only for 
the stranger. Its Tout-Paris is nothing but 
a heterogeneous collection of the smart sets 
of all countries and all nations, who make up 
an artificial and cosmopolitan society like that 
of any great capital, and therefore as little typ- 
ical of their own. But these are the only peo- 



FRENCH HOMES. 57 

pie we ever hear about. Realistic novelists 
have to go to them for their situations, and it 
is only from them that journalists can get their 
sensations. This is by no means pecuHar to 
Paris, but there is this difiference between it 
and London or New York. Any extravagant 
thing we read of in these other places falls 
upon a background made up of our exact 
knowledge of what the country really is, and 
so we immediately give it its proper value; 
while in France we know so little about the 
best types of people that nothing has its real 
perspective. 

Almost all the writers who have made any 
study of French life speak of this; men like Mr. 
Hamerton, Mr. Brownell, Mr. Theodore Child. 
One thing that Mr. Child wrote about the false 
values given to facts by newspapers constantly 
comes back to me. Their readers, he said, did 
not remember that a journalist valued a fact 
not by virtue of its importance, but of its nov- 
elty. From year's end to year's end a million 
and a half of people worked in Paris ten to 
twelve hours a day; an important fact, but not 
new, and so the newspapers did not mention it. 
A score of politicians met and drew up a crazy 
manifesto, and immediately the fact, being new, 
was telegraphed to the ends of the earth. Then 
when the man who read the newspapers came 
to Paris and got more exact notions of reality 
he made himself cpny^rsationally tiresome and 



58 PARIS AS IT IS. 

impaired his digestion in marveling at the 
calmness of the population, the activity of busi- 
ness of all kinds, and the prosperity of the city 
in general. 

During the ten or twelve years that I have 
known the French capital I have never seen it 
anything but calm, active and prosperous; but 
every now and then a letter, or sometimes a ca- 
ble from an interested family, begging me to 
go into the streets with precaution and to take 
no unnecessary risks, tells me that somebody 
in some obscure part of the town has again 
been drawing up a crazy manifesto, and that to 
the other side of the water we are, as usual, on 
the verge of a revolution. When the other side 
brings its preconceived ideas of French life 
over, it seldom gets an opportunity for compar- 
ing them with any object-lessons, and there- 
fore they never change. They seldom meet 
French familias of their own class in America, 
and even if they did, it would be difficult for 
them to know much about the ideas and 
standards of its members, since they could not 
carry on for fifteen minutes a general conver- 
sation in any language common to all. 

The fact is, that while everything we hear 
about Paris is true, it is only part of the truth. 
The typical life of France is in its bourgeoisie, 
and this the outsider seldom reads about, and 
still less meets. 

I am afraid that the word does not sound 



FRENCH HOMES. 59 

interesting, but the bourgeoisie is of two 
kinds, the petite and the haute. The "petite 
bourgeoisie," is made up of the mass of 
worthy but uninteresting famiHes, shop- 
keepers, modest functionaries, people living 
on tiny incomes, who lead a pot-au-feu ex- 
istence bounded by their own little interests. 
They take no part in any intellectual move- 
ment, and their sole ambition is to put by a lit- 
tle money each year for their children. They 
are, nevertheless, the economic force of France. 
It is from them that the country got in a few 
days twelve times the five milliards demanded 
by Germany as indemnity of war. 

The "haute bourgeoisie," on the other hand, 
includes the intellectual class of France; those 
families who consider a classical education the 
most necessary of possessions, and think it a 
duty to take an interest in every intellectual 
movement — in art, science and letters. You 
find in it the professors, the artists, the writers, 
the physicians, the engineers, every class in 
which personal value ranks above either name 
or fortune. The haute bourgeoisie Fran^aise 
is the moral force of the nation; the haute 
bourgeoisie Parisienne is to-day the real aris- 
tocracy of the Republic. It does not, however, 
strictly speaking, mean a class. It means peo- 
ple having a certain common etat d'esprit; a 
certain common view and conduct of life. A 
noble may be a bourgeois, and often is. 



6o PARIS AS IT IS. 

I do not know how I can better illustrate 
this than by describing two families among my 
French friends whom I have known intimately 
for a long time, who seem to me, each in their 
way, typical of the haute bourgeoisie and of its 
finest characteristics. One is the family of a 
professor. The husband is a self-made man, 
the grandson of a simple mason, who has made 
his position entirely by his brains. He grad- 
uated with high honors from the Ecole Nor- 
male Superieure, a special college in Paris for 
professors, in which only twenty-five pupils 
are admitted a year. Then he spent three years 
at the French school for the preparation of 
high professors at Rome, and almost immedi- 
ately after finishing there was appointed "pro- 
fessor of the Faculty." That is to say, through 
public lectures he prepares high instructors in 
his turn. This is the highest university title in 
France. It brings him in from seven to nine 
thousand francs a year. At twenty-eight he 
married a charming girl without a large dot, 
but of a fine family, the daughter of a dis- 
tinguished public man, noted for his breadth 
of mind and high character. 

Both these young people knew when they 
married that their income would never exceed 
fifteen thousand francs at the outside. This in 
Paris, an expensive capital, meant looking for- 
ward to a life governed by the strictest econ- 
omy. With the four children that have 



. FRENCH HOMES. 6i 

come to them in eleven years it has turned 
into a Hfe of privation. They have ac- 
cepted it gaily, and have as ideally happy 
a home as I know of anywhere. What makes 
it typical is that all its happiness and am- 
bition lies in intangible things. They live in a 
quaint little house with a garden near the Pan- 
theon. Of mornings the husband goes 
ofif to his lectures, while his wife keeps the 
house with that exquisite economy which is 
one of the things about France where our pre- 
conceived ideas have not played us false. She 
makes nearly all the children's clothes and her 
own with the aid of her little housemaid, and 
directs the children's education with that ex- 
treme care which forces itself upon us as one 
of the most conspicuous characteristics of 
French home life. The saying is, A French 
mother knows every hour of her daughter's 
Hfe. A French mother and father know every 
step of their children's education. It is the 
mother herself, in the professor's family, who 
takes the children to their cours. All this 
does not prevent her from finding the time 
to go now and then into society — de se 
montrer dans le monde — where you see her 
charmingly dressed, in perfect taste. At 
night husband and wife always dine together, 
and afterward read aloud for an hour or 
so. Nevertheless, the husband manages to 
write for the reviews and compete for the 



62 PARIS AS IT IS. . 

prizes offered by the Institute, making in this 
way the summer outing — a house in the Pyre- 
nees — and a Httle sum put by each year for the 
dot of the daughters. On Saturday evenings 
they are *'at home." You hear excellent music 
in their little salon and delightful conversation, 
since nearly all the people who drop in to dis- 
cuss literature, science and art over a tea-table 
belong to the university world. 

The other people are artists, both husband 
and wife, and from the French standpoint 
have money. That is to say, between them 
they have a private income of thirty thou- 
sand francs, which will be doubled on the 
death of their parents, and as much is 
added to it every year by the sale of the hus- 
band's pictures. He is one of the most distin- 
guished of the young painters of the Champs 
de Mars salon, and an example of that remark- 
able versatility which you find so often in cul- 
tivated Frenchmen. Before he began to paint 
he wrote, and won instant recognition through 
his short stories. His wife also paints. She is 
what is called a rare esprit, a brilliant aquarel- 
liste, who exhibits every year in the Champs 
de Mars, and an excellent musician. 

What makes this family typical is that, with 
money, they choose to adopt a standard of life 
whoseaimslie in intangible things just as much 
as the professor and his wife, whose means are 
so limited. The wife, who could give over to 



FRENCH HOMES. 63 

others much of the care of the house and the 
education of the children, chooses to look after 
both in precisely the same way as in the other 
home. Both she and her husband, who could 
live lives of leisure, give themselves up to the 
most unremitting work. His ambition is to 
create art; to hand down the artistic inheri- 
tance he has received, and add to it something 
of his own. So he works unceasingly, and his 
wife is his invaluable, if silent, partner. Never 
a picture is sketched on the canvas that has not 
been thoroughly discussed with her. It is she, 
too, who is her husband's inspiration, who 
gives him courage in the moments of discour- 
agement which come to every artist. Their 
luxuries are in adding now and then a fine 
tapestry or a beautiful piece of old furniture to 
their home, which is arranged with exquisite 
taste, and in taking every year a summer trip 
before they settle down to the old house in 
Brittany from which the husband has got so 
many of his best subjects. 

It is easy to see from these two examples the 
underlying principles upon which the bour- 
geoisie is based. I know many individual in- 
stances like them in America, but I do not 
know of any whole class of people all having 
a similar standard and manner of life. You 
can sum up the distinguishing characteristics 
of the best French famiHes in one sentence, 
which will apply to all. This is a common 



64 PARIS AS IT IS. 

and exactly defined conception, which has 
been handed down from generation to genera- 
tion, of duty; to work, to Hve within your in- 
come without touching the capital, to put by 
something every year for your children, to 
watch personally over their manners and de- 
velopment, and to give them the finest pos- 
sible education. This is what makes a family, 
according to the French idea. And these peo- 
ple make up the real France. Her economic 
wealth does not come so much from individual 
fortunes as from the small economies of the 
masses, and so her great artistic, scientific and 
literary movement is not carried on so much 
by the talent of single individuals as by the vast 
accumulation of methodical and often ob- 
scure efforts which keep the intellectual at- 
mosphere so overcharged that every now and 
then flashes from it a luminous spark known 
by some such name as Pasteur, Puvis de Cha- 
vannes, Renan, Guy de Maupassant. All 
these men were bourgeois, sons of bourgeois, 
direct descendants of that Tiers £tat which 
made the French revolution. 

It is this very bourgeoisie which is so 
much attacked at present, both from within and 
without; and I am aware that a society whose 
finest expression tends towards the obscure 
efforts of the masses rather than to the brilliant 
initiative of individuals is slenderly equipped 
for keeping its material preeminence in the 




Cozy Corner in a French Home. 




A French Home. 



FRENCH HOMES. 65 

struggle for fame and power of the Nineteenth 
Century. But from this comes the atmos- 
phere of repose which is one of the sources of 
the exquisite charm of Paris. The entire city 
is a perfected composition, all of whose lines 
and masses and tones contribute toward a 
general ensemble of elegance and beauty. And 
all its homes are finished and perfected in- 
teriors in which there is a common standard 
of taste and life. 

A home to the French always means a 
"harmony," as they put it, estabhshed with 
certain pieces of furniture, certain meubles 
around which the rest is built. One of my 
French friends, who has one foot in the Amer- 
ican colony, confessed to me that he had 
never found among us an interior that had 
to him the air of being furnishecl. "They all 
seem to me like encampments," he said. 
"So many little things set about!" These 
ordered homes that look as though they 
might have stood from all time, give you a 
sensation of exquisite repose; mingled with 
a constant fear of disturbing something. 

I once, with a friend, spent a year in a 
French family of distinction where they had 
never seen any Americans. One of its inmates 
was a delightful old French lady who was 
gradually growing deaf, and she thought it 
was because we were Americans that she did 
not hear. She was a good soul for whom we 



66 PARIS AS IT IS. 

had much affection and who responded to it 
by trying to ''make our education," as she 
called it, in a thousand ways. We had a loose, 
irregular manner of cutting the cards when we 
played with her at piquet; we did not Hke 
cheese, and therefore never ate any, sometimes 
which she construed into a lack in our early 
training; we did not air our linen properly; 
and, most serious thing of all, in our accounts 
we had a promiscuous way of lumping to- 
gether whole classes of things under the gen- 
eral term "sundries." ''There always will be 
gaps in the American education," she would 
say. "It cannot be otherwise." We had the 
estate of jeunes filles, although we had both 
seen something of the society of three coun- 
tries, and as of evenings we sat and sewed 
while someone read aloud, the shut-in, tran- 
quil, secluded atmosphere, about which there 
always seemed to be a faint, intangible per- 
fume of violets, made me feel as though I 
were a little child again, sewing patchwork at 
my mother's knee. On the occasions when 
we had a soiree, with "jeunes gens," I found 
myself unconsciously looking forward to 
meeting men with something of the feel- 
ing that Eve must have had when she con- 
sidered the apple. 

Let me say in passing, that the French still 
keep up a good deal everywhere the custom 
of reading aloud. I once remarked to a 



FRENCH HOMES. 67 

young Frenchman whom I knew upon the 
extreme beauty of his diction in speaking. He 
said it was the result of the habit they had at 
home of reading aloud. In the summer his 
mother had a former societaire of the Fran- 
gais come down once a week to their chateau 
to give the entire family lessons in diction. 

French homes are apt not to have the ma- 
terial comforts of ours. In very good houses 
the fire will be Hghted in the salon only when 
the company has actually rung at the door, 
or on the days of reception. I remember 
once buying a palm at the Louvre and having 
the salesman say to me, when I asked him if 
he would guarantee it to be in good condi- 
tion: ^'Certainly it is in good condition, but 
this is something that must be taken into 
account. Once a week, Madam, you will 
make a fire in your salon. The plant, which 
is accustomed to the cold every other day, 
will naturally feel this sudden change to a 
warm atmosphere, and wilt momentarily." 
A man in the Louvre could not imagine an 
interior where there was a fire in the salon 
oftener than once a week. 

DemouHns has given as one of his evi- 
dences of Anglo-Saxon superiority the many 
comforts we have in our homes, and these 
are incontestable. And yet as everything has 
the defects of its quahties, I cannot help feel- 
ing sometimes that our superior material 



68 PARIS AS IT IS. 

standpoint is rather hard to Hve up to, espe- 
cially for women. As a nation, we must be 
constantly increasing our numerators, in 
whatever represents the unit of our am- 
bitions; money, position, cultivation — and 
generally money — and it is upon the women 
that the necessity falls of giving constant and 
material proof of an advanced and enlight- 
ened state which is always changing its 
standards. Whole papers have to be invented 
to keep us informed from week to week and 
month to month of such things as the latest 
finds in etiquette and house decoration, the 
size of visiting cards, or the most approved 
kinds of kitchen dishes; and our sense of re- 
sponsibility over our individual opinions on 
art, literature, religion and other subjects is 
something prodigious. 

Everything with us tends towards individ- 
ual initiative, and everything with the French 
towards general repose; but since, whatever 
we may be, we are not lacking in a sense of 
humor, I know of nothing that could gratify 
it more than to be present at one of those 
rare interviews where too much of the 
individual initiative of one side of the water 
has crossed over to the old world and comes 
in contact with too much of the repose of the 
other. 

Once or twice in my life this privilege has 




A Family Breakfast. 




On the Street 



FRENCH HOMES. 69 

been granted me. I recall the expression on 
the face of a French wife of the type of one of 
those in the families I have described, at the 
answer of a pretty young American woman, 
who had come abroad alone for a year to 
study French and art, when asked how her 
husband was going to get along without her. 
"Oh, well — we didn't see so very much of 
each other when I was home. My husband 
was away all day — and we lived in a hotel — 
and at night when we didn't go out we gen- 
erally had people in." 

By far the most satisfying thing in this line, 
however, was a conversation between one of 
those French mothers who "know every hour 
of their daughters' lives," and whose family 
represented the concentrated essence of the 
French culture of seven hundred years, and 
two American girls of nineteen and twenty- 
one, respectively, who had come abroad alone 
to "make original investigations," as they 
told us. It was only one of them, however, 
a pretty creature like Daisy Miller, who 
exposed her past and present aspirations in 
the following monologue, broken scarcely 
by a single question from her amazed listener: 
"I want to know things for myself," she 
said. "I've come over to get everything 
from the original sources. I've got to learn 
French and German and ItaHan — oh, I've got 



70 PARIS AS IT IS. 

a mountain of work before me! I'm going to 
master French. I've given myself two 
months for it. Of course, that isn't very long, 
but as Miss Jones and I have the habit of 
studying, I think we can do a great deal. 
And I'm going to master art. At present 
I'm in a period where I think all art is the 
language of the soul. It's the expression of 
the soul — but that's another thing I want to 
do. I want to talk with them — the artists, I 
mean — and see if that's really true. The 
books say it is, but then they put every- 
thing so beautifully, don't you know. It 
doesn't take a girl very long to audit up a 
man — do you think it does — and as soon as 
I talk wnth them I shall know." 

"What did you think of the salons?" the 
French lady asked, politely, as there came a 
momentary lull. 

"Oh, we didn't go to them. There were 
nothing but modern pictures in them, and we 
hadn't come to that period yet. In French 
art I've only got as far as David, and the dis- 
tinctly Napoleonic period. I began with 
Egyptian art. I gave a series of parlor talks 
on it at home. I've talked to more than five 
hundred people. I talked without remunera- 
tion. Poppa says they ought to have been 
paid for Hstening to me. He says I'll never 
learn anything because I never listen, and I 
don't know but it's true. I've never listened 



FRENCH HOMES. 71 

in my life. I've always been used to talking. 
I have so many aspirations, and I don't know 
how they'll focus!" 

My French friend has several times asked 
me how they did focus. 



The Latin Quarter, 

My own Latin Quarter comprises the 
whole left bank of the Seine, indiscriminately, 
and is a confused mingling of souvenirs of 
Balzac, Miirger, Frangois Villon, Victor 
Hugo and Du Maurier, together with a thou- 
sand others that I have collected on my own 
account. I remember my first dejeuner in a 
studio in the quartier, in the spring, in a tall 
house near the Pantheon, which looked out 
on an old garden full of the scent of lilacs, 
through which veered yellow butterflies and 
dragonflies. Backed up against it were other 
old houses with cream and faded pink and 
citron-green walls, and on their roofs sat a 
whole company of chimney pots, like so many 
gossippy old ladies. At breakfast was a 
young musical composer, who played for us 
afterwards, amidst great enthusiasm, a Wag- 
nerian composition of his own in which the 
leitmotivs were what he called the students' 
cries. To this day I can hear him saying 
solemnly: "Here are the students coming 
in the distance!" I could not find out at the 
time, nor have I ever been able to discover 
since, that the students ever had any such 

72 



THE LATIN QUARTER. 73 

cries; but as the man of genius justly re- 
marked: *lf they had had any, they would 
have certainly been like those in his piece." 
After this come all the Latin Quarter 
memories of that first winter when I began 
really to live in Paris, and to enjoy things 
with that sense of possession which gives 
them such a particular interest, before their 
freshness has become dulled by too much fa- 
miliarity. I remember my first visits to the 
Luxembourg in the short afternoons, and 
coming out at the hour of closing into the 
gardens to find the statues shivering in the 
winter twilight, and the lights glimmering 
just enough through the mist to let you dis- 
tinguish the violets and mimosa in the little 
charettes that the women pushed along the 
pavements; and then a succession of impres- 
sions from strolls along the quays, a "mer- 
chant of fried potatoes" standing in a little 
niche full of deep shadows, with her face 
illuminated by the red Hght of her charcoal 
brazier, which fell also on the heap of yellow 
crescents that she shook in her strainer over 
a kettle boiling Hke a witches' cauldron. 
x\mong these souvenirs, too, is one of Notre 
Dame — my quartier thought nothing of tak- 
ing in the Isle of the City — a heavy mass 
against a pale evening sky, with a very young 
moon hovering exactly over one of its towers 
like a dot upon an i. She looked down gaily 



74 PARIS AS IT IS. 

upon the world, I remember, and seemed al- 
together different from the tranquil orb which 
rather gave way to the artificial lights, on 
my side of the Seine. How could any 
heavenly or other body, for that matter, be 
anything but gay who offered herself nightly 
the spectacle of Bohemia? For above every- 
thing else the secret of the eternal charm of 
the Quarter is the mysterious and intangible 
atmosphere of youth, and impulse, and free- 
dom, and art that belongs to the 'Vie de 
Boheme," which touches with its spell every- 
one who has enough temperament to respond 
to it. 

To solve the problem of whether the Latin 
Quarter, or rather French Bohemia, still ex- 
ists, you have only to ask yourself what con- 
stitutes a country. Is it soil, or is it the 
assembling of a certain number of individuals, 
subjected to the same traditions and the same 
laws? My own leaning is to the latter theory. 
New England will still be New England, for 
instance, for many years to come, any super- 
ficial falling off in the way of pies at Thanks- 
giving or in brown bread and beans to the 
contrary notwithstanding, and so Bohemia 
on the left bank of the Seine, in all its 
essential qualities will long go on, not alone 
as it has for the last fifty years, but as it has 
for centuries past. Only it has moved. The 
first blow was given to its old haunts when 



THE LATIN QUARTER. 75 

new streets, such as the Rue Soufflot, the 
Rue des ficoles, and the Boulevard St. 
Germain, played havoc with the labyrinth 
of Httle tortuous thoroughfares through 
which Francois Villon and the ''bad boys" 
used to wander and play so many good prac- 
tical jokes. This year the "Boul Mich," the fa- 
mous Boulevard St. Michel, which has always 
been the great artery of the Quarter, has put 
in electric Hght! Who can imagine Bohemia 
and electric light? Its inhabitants have fled 
this modern splendor. Some of them have 
gone to the neighborhood of the Jardin des 
Plantes, but by far the greatest number have 
transported their uncertain Penates to the 
upper end of the Boulevard Montparnasse, to 
Montrouge, and into the Vaugiraud quartier. 
This is the reason why you see them less 
and less in the part of Paris where you might 
naturally look for them; the famous bit 
in which, side by side, rise the College of 
France, the School of Medicine, the Sor- 
bonne, the School of Pharmacy, the School of 
Decorative Arts, the Law School, and a little 
nearer the Seine, the School of the Beaux 
Arts. Some of them have been known to 
appear in this region, and even to attend an 
occasional lecture, but I shall astonish no one 
who knows anything about Bohemia in say- 
ing that these compose the minority. You 
have no right to the title of Bohemian on 



76 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the left bank of the Seine unless you have for 
motto a certain saying of the landscape 
painter Nazon: "II y a des annees ou Ton 
n'est pas en train," 'There are years when 
you are not in the mood for doing anything!" 
Or another by an author whose name has un- 
fortunately fallen into oblivion, "II ne faut 
pas travailler entre les repas." "You must 
not work between meals!" 

The Bohemian is essentially an idler, but 
at least he is an idler of a particular species. 
He has a horror of the fixed task, of anything 
that he ought to do ; while often nobody could 
work harder when it is a question of some- 
thing with which he has no concern at all. 
I know of two medical students, for instance, 
who are excellent sculptors, of an artist who 
much more frequently haunts the hospitals 
than the studios, and of a man going in for the 
degree of Master of Arts who spends his en- 
tire time in composing music, as his means do 
not allow him the luxury of a piano, with the 
aid of a ruler which he makes resound on his 
table to get the key. 

To do Bohemia justice I must say that 
there are certain of its inhabitants who are 
real dilettantes in idleness, and never cultivate 
anything but the arts of conversation and 
repose. I knew one of these, a brilliant 
talker, and a great connoisseur in all artistic 
things, who never appears anywhere before 



THE LATIN QUARTER. 77 

dinner-time, for the simple reason that his 
habitual hour of rising is four in the after- 
noon. He is the son of a well-known Naval 
Officer at Toulon, and is in Paris to study 
medicine, but he has never done anything 
more than enter his name at the College, and 
to this day has not passed even his first ex- 
amination. For that matter, he never will 
pass it, and his only intellectual labors are 
the composition of the letters by which he 
keeps his family informed as to his progress 
in his studies. I am told they are marvels 
of ingenuity, and can well believe it. 

One of my latest souvenirs of the Latin 
Quarter is of a certain warm evening in July 
when I had the unexpected good fortune to 
catch a glimpse of Bohemia at home. I was 
dining with friends in the Rue Notre Dame 
des Champs in an apartment on the second 
floor, whose salon looked out over a whole 
little city of studios, hidden among green 
leaves. After dinner we talked late, and as 
I sat by the open window a vague murmur 
that floated in every now and then through 
the stillness of the summer night at last so 
roused my curiosity that I leaned over and 
looked out. Just below me, stretched out on 
a little square of grass about the size of a 
pocket handkerchief, under the Hght of three 
Venetian lanterns suspended from an anemic- 
looking apricot tree, were six youths ab- 



78 PARIS AS IT IS. 

sorbed in something that one of their number 
was reading aloud. It appeared to be a sort 
of weird Scandinavian poem, in which oc- 
curred every three minutes or so this refrain: 
*'Then Halmar, son of Halmar, the warrior 
with the long hair and piercing eye, seized 
with his robust hand the pointed javelins." 
There was no apparent coherence to this epic, 
which nevertheless seemed to throw the audi- 
ence into an ecstasy of joy. I was speculat- 
ing as to the cause of this, wondering whether 
they really Hked this tale of ''Halmar, son of 
Halmar," or whether by one of those delicate 
sentiments peculiar to the Latin Quarter they 
had plunged themselves into this literature of 
the North on that hot evening to give them- 
selves the delusion of being cool, when the 
reading was interrupted by a sudden invasion 
of the garden. It w^as the concierge in an 
extremely airy toilette, who invited the com- 
pany with force to let honest people sleep. 
They immediately dispersed without protesta- 
tions, with the exception of one individual 
who lived in the garden, and disappeared into 
a sort of vague perch in wood which was at 
the same time his apartment and studio. My 
friends told me that he was a Hungarian 
artist, who had the misfortune to believe 
himself alternatively the greatest painter, the 
greatest sculptor, and the greatest poet in the 
world, with the happy result that he never 



THE LATIN QUARTER. 79 

finished anything in either one of these arts, 
and rarely paid his rent. 

This Httle group of Bohemians, with others, 
were in the habit of meeting, when any of 
them had enough money, in a cafe that is now 
one of the most celebrated of the student re- 
sorts; a cafe with a charming name, about 
which lingers some of the perfume of old ro- 
mance: la Closerie des Lilas. It juts out like a 
prow at the meeting of the Boulevard Mont- 
parnasse and the rue Notre Dame des 
Champs, and not only is it provided with a 
shaded terrace, but this commands a superb 
view of the Place de I'Observatoire, on which 
is the entrance to the famous Bal Buller. To 
these advantages, which are of no small im- 
portance, it joins others that have given it a 
reputation among the entire Bohemia of 
Montparnasse. The gargons have a delicate 
way of never noticing when the water bottles 
that are ordered — since you must keep on or- 
dering something if you spend the entire even- 
ing in a cafe — only serve to replace refresh- 
ments of a more serious nature, involving 
pourboires, and they are quite ready to give 
credit for a week, even to patrons who mani- 
festly have not funds enough to let them in- 
dulge in the luxury of a starched collar. Some 
are students I know, who frequent the Close- 
rie, have sometimes tried to give me an idea 
of the conversations they have heard there in 



8o PARIS AS IT IS. 

even one hour of a single evening. What 
Hterary paradoxes and inconceivable philo- 
sophical theories, what sweeping criticisms of 
the art of all nations and all periods, inter- 
spersed with chafif and jokes of pyrotechnical 
brilliancy, and with what, in quarter jargon, 
would be called the abracadabrante declama- 
tions of a young model who had just discov- 
ered Maeterlinck! Even if I could remember 
them they would be nothing without the vis- 
ion of the terrace, as I saw it one night 
when a party of us visited it, with its groups 
of very much bearded youths, in broad- 
brimmed felt hats, smoking clay pipes around 
tables invariably covered with empty glasses. 
The man who took us there, a young 
painter of the Champs de Mars, is himself a 
famous Bohemian. As he made quite a hit at 
last year's Salon, and as I am sure he will 
some day be seriously known to fame, I will 
speak of him only by his initials, B. D. He 
is certainly one of the most amusing, most 
light-hearted, and most improvident individ- 
uals that I have ever met. I once went to his 
studio. It was perhaps as large as the palm 
of your hand, and besides the miscellaneous 
objects which filled every corner, it was at that 
time further encumbered by an enormous 
moyen-age citadel in card-board, which B. D. 
had made himself. He had wanted to paint a 
picture representing a ''feudal seigneur stand- 



THE LATIN QUARTER. 8i 

ing upon the tower of his donjon, contemplat- 
ing, in the midst of a flight of crows, villages 
burning at the horizon." As he had neither 
the inclination nor the money to take a jour- 
ney to see a real chateau of the middle ages, 
he had made one. When he has money it 
slips like water through his fingers. All his 
friends banquet at his expense, while he does 
lithography in colors, and succeeds perfectly, 
but each print that he makes costs him a thou- 
sand francs. When his purse is empty his 
equanimity remains undisturbed. He lunches 
and dines with the internes in their rooms in 
one of the numerous hospitals which he has 
decorated with his humorous sketches, and 
where, by a flattering innovation, he is in- 
scribed as "interne perpetuel." If a day 
comes when he absolutely must have money, 
he engages in the most astonishing enter- 
prises. Lately he has been doing panels by 
the piece, to decorate a restaurant car. 

How many droll stories of the Latin Quar- 
ter and of the youth of famous artists and 
others less famous he has told us. Who 
would say that the Quarter was dead if they 
could hear him tell with all his dramatic ra- 
ciness of ''enfant de Paris," the story of the 
'mauvais epicier" — the wicked grocer — to 
whom a band of students from the Beaux 
Arts went one day to beg him to let them 
mould his leg, under the pretext that it was 



82 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the most beautiful one in France; and who, 
having had the simpHcity to accede to this 
flattering request, was obHged to stay impris- 
oned in a mass of plaster and bricks for 
twenty-one hours, until a force of masons 
could be got to break him out with picks and 
restore him to his weeping family? 

Another one of these stories that I remem- 
ber was called 'The true Tale of the Famous 
Tournament of Bouguereau, the Master, and 
his comrade, Blaise Desgofifes." It told of 
how in their student days, Bouguereau and 
Blaise Desgoffes decided to find out the secret 
of Rubens's painting and each challenged the 
other to discover it first. Both were to take 
the same subject and work at it till the "trick 
of the Rubens" was discovered. The theme 
agreed upon was a chaste but simple chest- 
nut, of the variety known as horse. For 
two whole months neither Bouguereau nor 
Blaise Desgofifes left his canvas except to 
go to the Louvre to study the "Triomphs of 
Maire de Medicis" or the ''Kermesse." At 
last, on the sixtieth day the two met in the 
street on the way to each other's studios, each 
brandishing in his hand a chef-d'oeuvre rep- 
resenting a horse-chestnut. Both had won. 

"And that is the reason," added B. D., with 
imperturbable gravity, "why Bouguereau and 
Desgofifes paint Hke Rubens!" 



The Men of Letters, 

I wonder why no critic has ever thought of 
writing a comparative history of Hterature 
and art! It is surprising, when you compare 
the two, to see how their evolution has fol- 
lowed the same Hues. Take the ballads of 
Villon, for instance; now light, now deep, now 
mocking, now tender. With their alternate 
lightness and majesty they are exact em- 
blems of the Gothic cathedrals of the time, 
where grinning demons are side by side with 
pensive virgins. Then under the Renaissance 
the exquisite but mannered delicacy of a 
Ronsard has the same charm as the old 
French art of the day, through which has 
filtered the decadent grace of the Italian. In 
the time of Louis XIV., Racine shows all the 
classic force and harmonious coloring of a 
Poussin, while Corneille has the sumptuous- 
ness, the boldness, and the pomposity as well, 
of Lebrun, the decorator of Versailles. 
Boucher corresponds to the dainty frivolity 
and the corruption of the peiits mattres, 
makers of madrigals, while Watteau, under 
his apparent trifling, hides the same profound 
philosophy as Montesquieu in his Lettres Per- 

83 



84 PARIS AS IT IS. 

sancs, Diderot in his Le Neveti de Rameau and 
Voltaire in his Contes. The Revolution and 
the Empire were nourished with false an- 
tiquity in the poems of the Abbe Delisle, and 
the dramas of Marie Joseph Chenier as 
much as with David's Romans. Chateaubriand 
and Madame de Stael broke away from classic 
traditions at the same time that Gerard and 
Gros emancipated themselves from historical 
painting, and Victor Hugo, not more than 
Delacroix, is the leader of the romantic move- 
ment. The whole attempt of the Barbizon 
school to reveal the painter's individual mind 
and soul through his pictures of the world 
surrounding him is identical with that in the 
books of George Sand, Stendahl and Flaubert. 
From a distance of half a century we have 
been able to form an opinion of the works of 
this last great period. But if it be hard to 
judge correctly of the art of to-day, it 
is infinitely harder to give its relative value 
to contemporary literature, especially in a 
place like Paris. Ideas seethe there as though 
they formed part of the very atmosphere. 
Simple conversations often reveal so much 
imagination and such brilliant traits that you 
feel yourself in touch with talent of a high 
order. The press is literature, and every 
other man you meet is in some way a man of 
letters. Then this i« a transition period. We 
find no towering masterpieces in France at 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 85 

this end of the century, crystalHzing the es- 
sence of the time, as it were, and no schools. 
This is probably because of the eclecticism of 
Paris at the present day. It is in times of 
fighting for ideas that leaders stand out; 
others group themselves around them, and 
schools are formed. The battle for ideas also 
makes for chef d'oeiivres. Rousseau, Puvis 
de Chavannes and Whistler would probably 
have been far less great if they had notlDcen 
refused at the salons. 

We find to-day that many great prophets, 
like Zola, have seen the decline of their pop- 
ularity, and their pupils have either been for- 
gotten or have evolved, like Huysmans or the 
Rosny brothers, who are links between two 
periods of literary art, probably as distinct as 
the epochs of Louis XV. and Louis XVL 

What is most interesting in the literary 
situation of to-day, I think, are general views 
of the literary field and the men of letters, an 
attempt to discover what has really made for 
itself a permanent place in literature and had 
an influence on its evolution, and what are the 
tendencies for the future. But here I can 
necessarily make only a hasty survey, and this 
must be taken only as an effort to discern 
tendencies. 

As we look back we find that though the 
French literature of to-day got its impulse 
from Flaubert, George Sand and Stendhal, a 



86 PARIS AS IT IS. 

great evolution has taken place since then. 
It has drawn largely from foreign sources; 
the popularizing of Scandinavian, German, 
Russian, English and ItaHan works has 
largely influenced it. And, more than any- 
thing else, the luminous philosophy of Taine 
has had a great influence upon the literary 
movement by establishing the rights of the 
critic. Taine overthrew in France the theories 
of Hume, of Kant and of Hegel, tending to 
prove that each person is the judge of what 
he sees by demonstrating that science can 
exactly establish in what proportion different 
imaginations transform the same reality, and 
therefore receive impressions more or less 
elevated, and consequently more or less open 
to discussion. 

I remember seeing this admirably illus- 
trated one day at the Salon when two work- 
men were talking about a picture. It was a 
representation of a_^eld of wheat, crude in 
color, with every blade carefully and minutely 
painted, reproduced as in a photograph. 
"Sapristi, but that man's got that wheat 
field well;" was what they were saying. 
With their elementary intellectual and artistic 
development, that was probably the only sort 
of picture which could give them the sensa- 
tion of a real field, and the sudden emotion 
which a more highly organized and cultivated 
temperament would have before a landscape 




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THE MEN OF LETTERS. S7 

in which there was some wide, elevated im- 
pression of nature, interpreted through the 
temperament of an artist, they could not miss, 
for they had never known it. No matter what 
form the evolution of literature may have 
taken during* the last years, its principle has 
always remained the same; that is, the scrupu- 
lous study of the different sensations which 
life constantly unrolling itself everywhere 
makes upon the mind and soul of each indi- 
vidual. This seems to be a sort of touchstone 
for judging French literature. 

One of the most important forms of the 
literary evolution, of course, has been the 
naturalist movement, with M. Zola at its 
head. It is nothing new to say that M. Zola 
never was really a naturalist. His imagina- 
tion also transformed reality, and he saw of 
humanity only its envelope. He built up a 
colossal system, but only to interpret the ani- 
mal side of human nature from a pessimistic 
standpoint, and this will not have an influence 
that can be lasting, it seems to me, because it 
is too one-sided. I have never so well under- 
stood Zola's incompleteness as a literary art- 
ist as one day when someone pointed out to 
me his house in the country from which came 
the famous "Soirees de Medan." It stood on 
a hill overlooking the magnificent landscape 
oi the Valley of the Seine, which must have 
inspired some of his finest descriptions, Hkc 



88 PARIS AS IT IS. 

those in "Une Page d' Amour." But every- 
thing which revealed the personaHty of the 
man was uninspired and common. The house, 
an unattractive and pretentious white struc- 
ture, was surrounded by such a garden as 
would be the ideal of a retired grocer, filled 
with an infinity of little multi-colored flower 
beds suggesting dishes of hors d'oeuvres — 
fillets of anchovies bordered with chopped 
yolk of egg and parsley. 

It is interesting to follow out the literary 
careers of the men v/hom Zola grouped round 
him in those famous evenings at Medan, from 
which came that book of short stories in 
which M. Guy de Maupassant estabhshed his 
fame with "Boule de Suif. It vv^as only yes- 
terday, it seems to me, in the little parish 
church of my own quarter in Paris, I heard 
the De Profundis sung over the body of this 
great master of the short story, who had just 
died dramatically in a private hospital, chas- 
ing imaginary butterflies, in vv^hich he fancied 
he saw his fleeting ideas. If M. Guy de Mau- 
passant, in a general classification, is to be 
placed among the naturalists, in reality he is 
not one. He got his splendid literary train- 
ing, nevertheless, from Flaubert. "If you see 
a grocer standing in a doorway," said Flau- 
bert, "seize what is characteristic of that 
grocer and write a description of him which 
will always bring up that particular man, and 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 89 

no one else." Maupassant was under the in- 
fluence of the older writer for years, and no 
other person was ever admitted to so com- 
plete an intimacy with Flaubert. Teachers 
generally give to their disciples only what is 
superficial in their work. Their personal man- 
ner of thinking and seeing, which is what really 
differentiates them from others, they rarely 
give away. Their pupils, therefore, are gen- 
erally only their imitators ; but Flaubert gave 
to Guy de Maupassant all his best qualities of 
thought and form, at the same time that 
de Maupassant remained always himself, in- 
tellectually a sensitive and lofty spirit, apart. 
Before the simplest person he had an artistic 
emotion. He always saw the dme, the mind 
and soul, reflected through its environment. 
Then with his sure artistic instinct he eHmi- 
nated every detail unnecessary for revealing 
this, while the exquisite perfection of his style 
gave him a perfect medium for expressing it. 
He stands so high in his genre that no one has 
ever attempted to imitate him. I think of 
only one writer of short stories whose art in 
any way resembles his, and that is Mary 
Wilkins. She also has the same sort of artis- 
tic emotion before even the simplest soul, and 
the same discriminating process of eliminat- 
ing everything that is foreign to the impres- 
sion she wishes to give. 

M. Henry Ceard, the man who wrote the 



90 PARIS AS IT IS. 

most remarkable of the Medan stories after 
M. de Maupassant, we find has entirely 
dropped out. He has never been able to con- 
sole himself for the fall of naturalism, and 
lives outside of the world in a little Brittany 
fishing village, working continually on 
dramas and comedies which the theatres and 
pubHshers will have none of. Oddly enough, 
though, one day last summer, living drama, 
more poignant and terrible than anything 
men can invent, came to seek him out in his 
corner. One morning very early, when the 
dusk had scarcely begun to whiten, a sound 
of voices and of clashing of guns made him 
leap from his bed. Dreyfus had arrived in 
France, and was landing just under his 
window. 

M. Huysmans, another of the Medan men, 
has gone from naturalism into Catholicism, 
but as I consider him one of the men most 
characteristic of the latest development of the 
literary movement, I shall speak of him later. 

M. Paul Hervieu is the newest of the 
Academicians. Just elected to the chair of 
Pailleron, he intended to be a diplomat, but 
on being appointed attache to the French 
legation in Mexico, could not bring himself 
to leave Paris, and gave up diplomacy for 
literature, in which his success was immediate. 
He is young, fine-looking, with a sympathetic 
personality. He is one of a pleiad of young 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 91 

novelists who cultivate literature a these; he 
writes books with a purpose, which may 
be either a principle or a paradox. It is the 
school of Alexandre Dumas fils. but pro- 
foundly modified by the change in tastes, and 
fashions, and by foreign influence, more par- 
ticularly that of Ibsen and Tolstoi, and it is 
marked by the extreme large-mindedness 
which characterizes every sort of art to-day — 
the pensee ecrite as well as pensee peinte. The 
underlying principle is always to view life 
sincerely through one's own temperament, 
"de se rouler en son moi," as said the old 
philosopher, Montaigne. Besides M. Paul 
Hervieu, with l' Armature and Peints par eiix 
Memes and the play Les Tenailles, others of 
this group are M. Porto-Riche (author of 
rAmonreuse)y Brieux, M. Maurice Barres (au- 
thor of Deracincs), who was a Boulangist 
Deputy and is now one of the strongest par- 
tisans of Deroulede; M. Paul Adam (author 
of La Force), an employe in the Minister e des 
Postes et Telegraphe, who will write between 
two letters on administrative detail, such a re- 
markably constructed novel as rEmpreinte, 
against the Jesuit schools; M. de Curel (au- 
thor of la Noiivele Idole), the rich and noble 
owner of a steel foundry, who writes in his 
leisure moments; and then there is the 
"Academy Goncourt," with the Marguerite 
Brothers, sons of General Marguerite, the 



92 PARIS AS IT IS. 

hero of the war of 1870, and the freres Rosny, 
who also especially illustrate the tendencies 
of to-day, and whom I will speak of later. 

One thing that seems surprising to-day is 
to see how limited an influence, comparatively 
speaking, the Goncourts have apparently had 
upon literature. You will find English critics 
of ten years ago comparing the infitience of 
what they call their luminous pages with those 
of Flaubert. One of these, now dead, speaks 
of ''the movement of the last thirty years hav- 
ing its descriptive germs in Rousseau, Cha- 
teaubriand and Gautler; its psychological pre- 
cursors in Diderot, Stendhal and Balzac, and 
culminating in the two consummate artists, 
Flaubert and de Goncourt." The de Gon- 
courts were not luminous in the sense that 
they were not clear. No writer ever makes a 
great impress upon his time unless his style 
is simple and clear. The de Goncourts, no 
doubt, were an influence, but they were a 
transition, not a culmination. In ''Soeur 
Philomene" you find the most remarkable 
example of exactly what they put into litera- 
ture. With one page, the exquisite descrip- 
tion of a hospital ward, you have a setting 
for the entire book. 

When Paris began to tire of naturaHsm, a 
few years ago, it welcomed with extraordi- 
nary ardor the analytical novel brought to it 
by M. Paul Bourget, a favorite disciple of 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 93 

Balzac. When he was young he was a 
disciple of Balzac in the most literal sense of 
the word, for he carried his veneration for the 
great master to such a point that, like him, he 
worked late into the night and set himself at 
his writing again at three in the morning, like 
Balzac, after drinking a great cup of black 
coffee, equally like Balzac. At that time he 
was a poor little professor in the £cole Al- 
sacienne, and lived in one room in an attic in 
the Rue Guy-de-Labrosse, furnished simply 
with a little iron bed, an old armchair, books, 
and Balzac's bust. His old pupils will tell 
you that even then they remarked the ex- 
treme variety in his cravats which was the 
first indication of his leaning towards that z'ic 
elegante which it was to be his destiny to 
paint. Many of the traits of Casal, one of 
his early heroes, who ranged his forty pairs 
of boots in a room especially set apart for 
that purpose, and had all his linen laundered 
in London, he took from himself. In the 
early days he used to ramble through the 
Latin Quarter and along the quays with M. 
Francois Coppee and M. Barbey d'Aurevilly, 
and one of the greatest pleasures of the three 
was dining together on Sunday evening at 
Coppee's. Even if M. Coppee and his sister 
w^ere away, the old servant put on the pot au 
feu just the same, and M. Barbey d'Aurevilly 
dined alone, except for the society of the 



94 PARIS AS IT IS. 

poet's cats. It is of those days that Riche- 
pin's verses speak: 

'Tai fait un dejeuner tres faible chez B our get, 
II n'az'ait pas de vin." . . . 

Now M. Paul Bourget is married — range — 
and his large apartment in the Rue Barbet 
de Jouy, near the Chamber of Deputies, is the 
comfortable interior of a man who has "ar- 
rived." His salon is crowded with works of 
art brought back from Italy; a head of Christ 
by a primitive painter looks down sadly on 
the modern English chairs of polished wood, 
covered with morocco. M. Bourget is still a 
hard worker, but his star has paled. His 
books are no longer Parisian events. Per- 
haps, however, this is because of the con- 
stantly increasing indifference of the public to 
society novels like his, representing only a 
cosmopolitan and artificial world, an un- 
healthy exception in the life of Paris. His 
first books were based simply on his aventures 
de petit professeur, in which he used to give 
an animate form to his studies of the con- 
sciousness. 

M. Marcel Prevost, another writer who has 
disputed M. Paul Bourget's popularity with 
the public, especially the feminine public, and 
not without success, is in a period of decided 
decline. While M. Bourget always repre- 
sented rich and elegant society women seek- 
ing, for perverse sensations, through desoeu- 




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THE MEN OF LETTERS. 95 

vrement and nervosity, M. Marcel Prevost 
went still farther, and took as models ac- 
tresses, demi-mondaines or rastoqoueres. 
Neither of these two writers ever made 
studies of the real Farisienne, interested as 
much in her home as in society, and in things 
of the mind as in the elegance of her dress 
and surroundings. And for that matter, how 
could they have studied these? M. Bourget 
only began to go into society after his success 
as a novelist; M. Prevost, a graduate of the 
Ecole Polytechnique, was an engineer in a 
tobacco manufactory in a provincial town in 
the Nord, and only came to Paris after his 
first society novel, "le Scorpion," had proved 
a success. 

One thing we must remember in thinking 
of French writers is the way in which books 
are looked upon as a source of fixed income 
in France. A man expects a rente from his 
novels. He produces one a year as another 
man would do so much business a year. And 
almost always in the genre which he finds the 
public wants and will buy. This statement 
must not be taken too generally, but it is cer- 
tainly a decided factor in the immense dis- 
parity that there is apparently between French 
letters and French life. M. Prevost, for in- 
stance, appealed to the curiosity of the femnie 
de mande about the femme of the demi-monde. 
As this took, he kept on. He is successful, 



96 PARIS AS IT IS. 

too, because, he writes well. He is a perfect 
story-teller. 

It is quite natural for me to follow these 
two '' feminist cs'' — M. Bourget and M. Her- 
mant — with Gyp, Mme. de Martel-Janville, 
who is noble, has the blood of Mirabeau in 
her veins, and proves it as much by her verve 
in dialogue as by her fougue as a politician. 
For Mme. Gyp is not satisfied with writing 
delicious stories like ''le Marriage de Chiffon'' 
or ''seenettes" satirizing the morals and man- 
ners of the time; she also lets her voice be 
heard in politics, and very loud. She was the 
friend of Felix Faure. She was also the 
friend of Boulanger, and one of the most 
active electioneers for the General's candi- 
date. She went from cabaret to cabaret in 
the little summer resort of Lion-sur-Mer, 
where she had a country house, haranguing 
the fishermen, and the evening of election 
day, on the triumph of her candidate, she 
went herself, and took of¥ the doorbell of the 
defeated Republican. This brought her into 
the Normandy police court, where she was 
lined five francs, and the result was a bril- 
liant satire from her pen, "How Elections Are 
Carried On at Tiger-by-the-Sea," with illus- 
trations by Bob, which made her famous. 
Gyp does everything with the same ardor. 
She rides horseback; she paints portraits as 
well as decorative things, always signed 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 97 

''Bob;" she writes indefatigably. She gener- 
ally works at night. 

Only a few of the women who have ever 
lived have been creators, and Gyp is one of 
them. She is absolutely without pedantry, 
and, as someone has said of her wittily in 
Paris, ''She is the first French woman of let- 
ters who has resigned herself not to be a man 
of letters." Her books, the type of disre- 
spect for everything and everybody, certainly 
are not to be taken as serious pictures of 
French life, for she is a satirist — nevertheless, 
a satirist of great esprit and charm — and 
a polemicist of violence, and everything there- 
fore is necessarily exaggerated. With the 
money she has made from her books she has 
bought and restored the old ruined castle of 
the Mirabeaux in Provence, for while Gyp 
lashes pitilessly the little weaknesses of 
others, she allows herself a trifle of vanity 
over her genealogy. 

M. Henri Lavedan, M. Abel Hermant, M. 
Maurice Donnay are three men whom you in- 
stinctively associate with Gyp, since they all have 
the same genre of writing. M. Henri Lavedan, 
author of "Catherine," one of the latest men 
elected to the Academic Frangaise, son of a 
greatly esteemed man of letters, created a 
little scandal in the grave palace of the im- 
mortals by letting the title of Academician 
appear on the poster of such a comedie as 



98 PARIS AS IT IS. 

"Vieux Marcheur," certainly the most daring 
play that has ever been put upon the stage. 
M. Henri Lavedan began life, after leaving 
the clerical school where he was educated, 
by doing nothing. He was for a long time 
one of the bored members of a band of "de- 
soeuz^res" youths who called themselves "Les 
Faitcheurs," because their distinguishing 
characteristic was to carry their walking 
sticks in a listless fashion with the handle 
down, as reapers hold their scythes. They 
used to meet in a room in the Cafe Americain, 
on the Boulevard. Disgust for these inanities 
finally made a satirist out of M. Lavedan; but, 
as he says himself, it took his talent a long 
time to wake up. With a hatred of the "monde 
chic/' there awoke in him pity and tenderness 
for the simple and humble. ''There are two 
Lavedans in me," he is fond of saying; "this 
one and that one;" and he points to his head 
and his heart. 

M. Maurice Donnay, who made his debut 
as a poet of the Chat Noir, is the most bril- 
liant of the young French dramatists, author 
of "Les Amants" and "T Amour euses;' brought 
out at the Gymnase, and "Le Torrent/' giy en at 
the Frangais. In passing, I might speak of a 
whole school of humorists and poets born 
from that quaint Bohemian cafe on Mont- 
martre, le Chat Noir — Alphonse Allais, Au- 
riol, Tristan Bernard, Willy, Franc-Nohain, 






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THE MEN OF LETTERS. 99 

Pierre Weber. They nearly all owe their 
success, especially Allais, Auriol and Tristan 
Bernard, to their imitation of American 
humorists. 

Among what would be called the great 
French poets of to-day, Frangois Coppee is 
the last who can be said to belong to the 
NaturaHst school. His enemies, and he has 
a good many since he went into politics in 
the anti-Dreyfus party, will tell you that he is 
in poetry what George Ohnet is in prose, and 
it is certain that his genius is most unequal 
and that some of his verses have laid them- 
selves open to the most absurd parodies. You 
could not say that his poem, ''The Accident," 
a story of the heroism of a railway employe, 
beginning: 
"Montfort was a stoker on the Northern 

Line," 
was of a very high order of poetry. It has 
been arranged for the benefit of all the great 
railway companies: 
"Montfort was a stoker on the Western 

Line," 
"Montfort was a stoker on the Eastern Line." 
"Montfort was a stoker on the Lyons Line," 
"Montfort was a stoker on the Paris-Orleans 

Line," etc. 
Nevertheless, Frangois Coppee is a real 
poet who frequently shows fine poetic feeling. 
He is the son of a little employe in the 



109 



PARIS AS IT IS. 



ministry, and grandson of a brave bourgeoise 
of Paris, who once danced a gavotte with 
Robespierre. Coppee never finished col- 
lege, and never studied much while he was 
there. Once when he was appointed by the 
minister to distribute the prizes in one of the 
great lycees, he could think of no better sub- 
ject for his discourse than the uselessness of 
study, of which he, Francois Coppee, was the 
best possible example, since he had never 
been anything but a dunce at school, and that 
had not prevented him from becoming an 
Academician. This was a source of great 
scandal in the university world, and great 
amusement to Paris. 

When I used to see M. Francois Coppee 
four or five years ago at the house of a 
common friend, he seemed as young as a boy, 
and, indeed, until his conversion lately to 
Catholicism, after a very serious illness, he 
was very young in character, and loved noth- 
ing better than to be with the students. He 
went to the Bal Bullier and similar resorts, 
where, before him, they had not been accus- 
tomed to see Academicians. He has bought 
a little place just outside Paris called 
*'la Fraiziere," and there he spends nearly all 
his time now in the society of his sister 
Annette, his dog Trufife, his goat Bella and 
his cat Petit-Loulou. 

Thirty or forty years ago he, with M. 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. loi 

Heredia and M. Anatole France, made up a 
little club called le Parnasse. M. CatuUe 
Mendes, one of the best known of the 
dramatic critics, belonged to it later, I think 
— a curious type, who has published an in- 
finity of novels and verses, for the most part 
vvTitten on the tables of cafes, or in cabs. He 
is an eternal nostamhiile, whose adventures 
and whose duels can no longer be counted. 
M. Jose Maria de Heredia is a last represen- 
tative of the school of Banville or Leconte 
de Lisle, those poets who professed the cult 
of rhyme, and thought it of more importance 
in poetry than the thought. All M. de 
Heredia's literary baggage is contained in 
120 sonnets of fourteen verses, chiseled like 
antique medals, with the ideas and sonor- 
ous words full of coloring so condensed that 
they succeed in evoking immense epopees. 
Someone in Paris said that he put ten cen- 
turies into fourteen Hnes, and someone else 
that his poetry was a "Liebig's Extract." No 
one writes more perfect French than this nat- 
uraHzed Cuban. He is the father-in-law of 
Andre de Regnier. 

As to M. Anatole France, I do not know 
that anyone has ever better expressed what 
he means to the age than Mr. Henry James by 
saying that he is the great luxury of our time. 
Fie is the most perfect writer and the clearest 
thinker since Voltaire. But when you know 



I02 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the man from the inside, as it were, from 
those who know him intimately, you find that 
it is, above everything else, as a critic that he 
must be considered; a critic resigned to the 
things of to-day, but so profoundly skeptical 
for the future as to have evoked the criticism 
upon himself of being a "universal demora- 
lizer." His skepticism leads him to be pro- 
foundly indulgent to everything and every- 
body, even himself, and he has abandoned his 
family. "UOrme dii Mail'' "le Mannequin 
d'OsieVy' "TAnneau d' Amethyst e,'' the most 
cruel criticisms possible upon the life of the 
third republic, unfortunately arrive at no con- 
clusions and give no remedies. M. Anatole 
France was the son of a bookseller on the 
quais, and all those charming glimpses of 
childhood in "le Journal de Mon Ami'' and 
''Pierre Noziere" are taken from his own 
souvenirs. 

I must pass over the other critics, of whom 
so much has been written — M. Jules Lemaitre, 
M. Brunetiere, M. £mile Faguet — just elected 
to the Academic Francais — mentioning only 
M. Andre Chevrillon, nephew of Taine, the 
English professor in a provincial Lycee, if 
only to show that the fine art of criticism in 
France in no way declines, since a man can 
make a sensation in Paris with two critical es- 
says such as M. Chevriilon's on Rudyard Kip- 
ling — to go back to French poetry, in which 



THE MEN OF LETTERS. 103 

there has been such a decided evolution with 
the school of the symbolists, of whom the first 
were Mallarme and Verlaine. Our Edgar A. 
Poe was really the first symbolist, however. 
Even though it took the French to discover 
him. 

The only way to understand what French 
symbolic poetry means is, I think, to read it — 
bits of it; some of it could only be comprehen- 
sible to "the bon Dieu and Ibsen," I fear. 
Read Verlaine's *T1 pleure dans mon cceur 
comme il pleut dans la ville." Then you will 
wonder how you ever got on without these 
bits. Think, for instance, of the very element- 
ary emotion in our old lines, "The mel- 
ancholy days have come," etc., and com- 
pare them with the actual shiver you feel as 
you read Mallarme's "Plainte d'Automne/' with 
its sad minor note struck at the very begin- 
ning: "Since Maria left me to go to some other 
star — which, Orio7t,Alta'ir, or thou, green Venus f 
— / have always loved solitude,'' and then, deep- 
ening the impression, symbol after symbol, 
in the most delicate nuances — loneliness, 
"How many long days I have spent alone with my 
cat. By alone I mean without a material being, 
for my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit/' the 
"moment," "Since that white creature is no 
more, my favorite season in the year is the last 
languishing days of summer which precede the 
autumn, and in the day the hour zi'hen the sun 



I04 PARIS AS IT IS. 

rests an instant just before fading away, throw- 
ing its rays of yellozv copper upon the gray walls 
and its rays of red copper upon the window 
panes f' and then there is the sudden contrast 
given by the playing of the hand-organ, 
"zvhich sings languishingly under my zvindow in 
the great alley of poplars whose leaves seem dead 
to me even in the spring-time, since Maria passed 
through it with the waxen tapers for the last 
time. Why is it that as it played a joyously 
vidgar air zvhich zvoidd put gayety into the heart 
of the faubourgs, its refrain zvent straight to my 
sotd and made me weep f 

This is exactly the same method of giving 
impressions as that of the painters who tri- 
umph to-day — Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, 
Menard, Dauchez. An entire school has fol- 
lowed Verlaine and Mallarme, from M. Henri 
de Regnier, extremely classic in inspiration, 
extremely colorist in method, down through 
Moreas, Kahn, Laforgue, Stuart Merrill, 
Francis Viele-GriflBn, to the very latest men- 
Andre Rivore, Fernand Gregh, Andre Dumas. 

Pierre Loti (Pierre Viaud) really belongs 
among the poets. He is the greatest artist 
of all the men of letters. Words come to him 
no matter how; he expresses all his emotions, 
his sensations, instinctively, without the least 
effort. He belongs to one of the Huguenot 
families in La Rochelle, but spends most of 
his time in a quaint place in the Basses 






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THE MEN OF LETTERS. - 105 

Pyrennes, where he has a beautiful Moorish 
house. 

M. Edmond Rostand is rather a pupil of 
Leconte de Lisle than a symbolist. I fancy 
his immense success in Paris has come not 
only from the fact that he was born a poet and 
a dramatist, but that he fell in with a dawning 
wave of tendencies in the public. There is an 
underlying current against naturalism, end-of- 
the-century-ism; a leaning towards the old 
literature of noble emotions — movement, lofty 
ideals, pathos and fire, such as we find in Cy- 
rano. Look at the popularity in America 
of a certain sort of historical novel just now. 
Coquelin, clever man that he is, foresaw this — 
he told me so — he made up his mind that the 
time had come for a theatre of the old 
drama of emotion and action, and the success 
of the Porte St. Martin proves his far-seeing 
intelligence. M. Rostand is a man of great es- 
prit. *T don't see why the Americans want to 
claim Cyrano," he said at the time of the suit 
against him for having plagiarized an Amer- 
ican. ''They have already taken so much from 
Spain." M. Rostand married a charming 
poetess named Rosemond Girard, whom he 
heard recite some of her own verses at an 
evening party and fell in love with at first 
sight. 

The pendulum of reaction has swung as far 
as possible in France in Joris Karl Huysmans. 



io6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

In the beginning he was a naturalist, one of 
the Medan men who became famous through 
the most brutal and cynical novels possible, 
like La-Bas or A Rebours, with a hero like 
the decadent des Esseintes; a type that 
was said to be drawn from the decadent 
poet Comte Robert de Montesquieu. Then 
he suddenly surprised the world by writ- 
ing En Route, in which he depicted the 
pure joys of the Trappist fathers, and La 
Cafhedrale, which showed the great beauty of 
faith manifested in the Cathedral of Chartres. 
When he was retired from the Ministry of 
the Interior he built a little house under the 
shadow of the Abbaye of Ligurge, where he 
lived for several years a semi-monastic exist- 
ence. He has just entered into novitiate 
to become a Benedictine monk. Those who 
knew him intimately foresaw this. While he 
was yet in the Government religious objects 
rubbed elbows with profane in his tiny apart- 
ment in the Rue de Seine; a reliquary contain- 
ing a bone of St. Lidwine was side b}^ side 
with Forain's drawings, and he used to say: 
*'The field of naturalism is too limited. It con- 
fines itself to the seven capital sins." 

M. Huysmans will not be cloistered, but will 
belong to a sort of third order called the 'Obla- 
ture, and still live in the house and garden he 
built himself. Certainly, this will be one of the 
strangest sights to the people of the end of the 



THE MEN Of LETTERS. 107 

twentieth century to look back upon; this 
man of brilhant talent shut up in the ivory 
tower of his cloister, of which each capital is 
dedicated to a saint and decorated with mys- 
tic symbols, the capital of St. Francis of As- 
sisi with a cord and a violet leaf, that of St. 
Lidwine with a rose leaf, St Martin with a 
horseshoe and a viper, St. Benoit with a 
medal, a raven and an oak leaf. And 
in the garden the new Benedictine revives the 
herbs and flowers of the old books; the medic- 
inal plants which, according to the poem, Hor- 
tiilus, a good abbe of the ninth cen- 
tury cultivated in his cloister, twenty-three in 
all, liturgical and medicinal. 

And besides this, the twentieth century 
will look back on those two brothers who sign 
themselves J.-H. Rosny, and write together 
like the Goncourts, of whom they were the 
warm friends and disciples. The preface of one 
of their last books, VImperieuse Bonte, states 
clearly their aim: "Here is a book entirely 
consecrated to telling the effort of man to love 
his neighbor in great suffering and great mis- 
ery. Do not seek in it either a philosophical 
or a social thesis; and, nevertheless, it is not 
one of those subjects which leave the soul im- 
prisoned in a dream of glacial beauty, nor in 
the narrow ivory tower of art for art's sake. 
It is too steeped in poor humanity for that, too 
palpitating with the sobs of human beings. II- 



io8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

luminated by a single ray of genius, it might 
have troubled profoundly millions of souls, agi- 
tated an elite, and collaborated towards the 
formation of a new moral state of things." The 
Rosnys treat altruism as a force; a '^force in 
which the highest intelligences and the firmest 
wills may find as fecund a development as in 
science or in art;" and their next book, they 
announce, they propose to devote to the broad, 
general and socialistic devotion of the individ- 
ual to the masses. 

The MM. Rosny are to me by far the most 
interesting of the French men of letters to-day. 
They are obscure; they will never found a 
school; but possibly it is they who voice the 
tendencies of the coming literature. The old 
"art for art's sake" has certainly gone by. The 
new literature will certainly be creative, but 
will it bring about a new order of society 
based on the socialistic devotion of the indi- 
vidual to the masses? 



The Restaurants. 

The art of the cuisine is in decadence, the 
old chefs will tell you, in Paris, and yet the 
vogue of the Paris restaurants remains un- 
changed. 

This is because they still hold society. 
None of the things which are really character- 
istic of Paris — not the Opera, nor the Salons, 
nor the Private Views, nor the Horse Show, 
nor the races, nor the restaurants, exist alone 
for what they are in themselves, but for what 
they mean as social institutions. Their im- 
portance comes largely from their social pres- 
tige, and when they lose that, they generally 
drop into oblivion. This is particularly true 
of a restaurant. There is always one where, 
at the hour of supper, after the closing of the 
theatres, you are sure to find the society 
men and women and the grand seigneurs of 
art and letters of tout-Paris, and the Prinzes- 
sen, Comtessen and Serene Altessen of other 
countries who are passing through, and those 
Grand Dukes who, it is said, were at the bot- 
tom of the Franco-Russian alliance — that 
they might have a play-ground in Paris and 
without pay — and the kings, if there be any 

109 



no PARIS AS IT IS. 

kings within the city walls, and the feminine 
celebrities of all sorts, without which such a 
place is nothing; the spot in which Fashion in 
general at that particular moment is holding 
her court — in default of other courts — and 
that will be the restaurant, and no other. 

In all this there seems to be nothing of the 
old art of the cuisine and of its traditions in 
which we hear of a chef like Vatel, who com- 
mitted suicide because the tide was late and 
the fish was wanting for his patron's table, or 
Careme, who retired from his royal master's 
service because he was misunderstood. "I 
composed for him," said Careme, bitterly, 
speaking of George the Fourth, "a longe de 
veau en surprise. He ate it, but he could not 
comprehend it." And then the great chef 
"rendered his apron," as the expression is in 
the language of his craft. It is equivalent, 
in this case at least,. to saying that he "ren- 
dered his last breath." Remarkable dishes 
may be composed by great chefs for these 
fashionable supper restaurants; but if they 
are, they are not what we hear of when these 
are talked about. 

One of the principal characteristics of the 
fashionable restaurant, in fact, is that no 
cuisine, however good, will ever be enough to 
make it keep its vogue for more than two 
seasons in succession. In no other court has 
fashion ever found herself so unrestrained, so 



THE RESTAURANTS. iii 

free to follow out the capriciousness and love 
of change which are her strongest traits. So 
she flits now to one place, now to another. 
Last year the world was at Paillard's. This 
season it suddenly left the boulevards and 
flew dow^n the Avenue de I'Opera to the new 
Cafe de Paris which had just risen, with newly 
decorated wings, from the ashes of its faded 
self. Where will it be another season? You 
might just as well ask me what will be the 
mode in bonnets in the year 2000. Anyone 
who goes to Paris and wants to sup at the 
cafe in vogue, unless he have some friend 
sufficiently in the movement to tell him just 
what one it is at the moment, has only one 
resource left to him. He must start out and 
hunt till he comes upon it. 

How many a disappointment would be 
spared the unsophisticated traveler if he only 
knew this particular feature of Paris life! He 
goes abroad, perhaps, in the reign of Felix 
Faure, and on getting to the French capital, 
and being taken some evening after the thea- 
tre to the restaurant in fashion, finds it the 
m.ost brilliant and amusing place he has ever 
seen in his life. It is full of exquisitely 
dressed women — those for whom the great 
artists of the mode create and have their 
being — and with distinguished-looking men 
wearing decorations, and with other men 
and women, less distinguished in appearance, 



112 PARIS AS IT IS. 

but who have about them that grand air 
which is a sort of mysterious family likeness 
between people who are personages. And 
then La Belle Otero comes in from the Folies 
Bergeres with her train of followers; and then 
the rival beauty, Liane de Pougy, with her 
court, and la Cavalieri; and then it is a Prince 
of Siam, or the Grand Dukes, or the Enghsh 
Prime Minister, or the latest bride of the 
latest titled marriage — perhaps the only one 
among them all that the traveler recognizes, 
for her face has been thrust before him in 
every illustrated paper he has lately had from 
home. Of everything that he finds on his 
travels, this is what pleases him most, and 
when he goes back he tells every one he sees 
that when they are in Paris they must be 
sure to take supper at this particular cafe; 
which I have known of his pronouncing so as 
to rhyme with safe. 

Then, perhaps two years later, in the reign 
of £mile Loubet, he comes again, and brings 
with him some of the very people to whom 
he has vaunted these splendors, and, when 
he goes to find them, they have as completely 
vanished as a vision summoned up by Alad- 
din's lamp. Possibly the restaurant is entirely 
empty; or, if it be a place like the Grand Cafe, 
it is filled with peaceful bourgeois, drinking 
grogs with a seriousness which suggests 
latent thoughts of rheumatism, or tourists in 



THE RESTAURANTS. 113 

traveling tweeds, or tranquil individuals play- 
ing dominoes. And then the traveler begins 
to talk about "changed Paris" and to sigh for 
the good old days of Felix Faure, just as Du 
Maurier sighed for the good old pre-Imperial 
days, and as we all of us sigh for the "there 
that is never here" when we come back and 
do not find things exactly as we left them; 
without taking the trouble to reflect that this 
old world of ours, so far as its human beings 
and their occupations and amusements are 
concerned, has gone on in pretty much the 
same way for six thousand years, and prob- 
ably has not selected that particular moment 
of its history to change, even though it may 
have moved on. 

Living in Paris gives you one secret of this 
m.oving on from one fashionable restaurant 
to another; and that is, that the women who 
invariably make the reputation of such places 
are always seeking for themselves some new 
cadre — some new framework for their beauty. 
Women of the world go to these restaurants, 
but no woman of society ever "makes" one. 
Their vogue is always given by that certain 
part of the feminine sex whom I once heard 
characterized by a little American woman 
in Paris as "so many charming-looking ladies 
to whom one could never speak." The am- 
bition of these just now is to appear dis- 
tinguished—to be noticeable for quiet ele- 



114 PARIS AS IT IS. 

gance in toilette and bearing, so that they 
carry about with them an air of the whole 
world instead of the half; but change they 
must have. If last season's cafe had Moorish 
decorations, that of this year must be some- 
thing as far as possible removed from it; 
Louis XVI., perhaps, with a background of 
mirrors painted with vines and flowers and 
dainty cupids, such as wandered over the 
walls of the boudoir of Marie Antoinette. 

Where then, this time, are the old tradi- 
tions of the cuisine Frangaise? I hear some 
one ask, and of that table which one of the 
most delicate and subtle writers of our day 
has said "was more entertaining than 
scenery," and that it "probably had more 
devotees than love." "Do you give in that 
you are any the less immortal for that?" he 
added. "To detect the flavor of an oHve is 
no less a piece of human perfection than to 
find beauty in the colors of a sunset." It was 
of this very traditional cuisine that I was 
talking a few evenings ago to a French 
friend of much experience in dinners, and 
erudition on all subjects. "Be good enough 
to tell me just what you mean by tradi- 
tions," he answered. "For instance, in the 
time of Louis XIII. all the dishes were 
perfumed with musk. But that, I fear, would 
not appeal to people nowadays. And then, a 
great many things that used to be eaten have 




Restaurant Ledoyen. 




Salon in the Cafe de Paris. 



THE RESTAURANTS. 115 

disappeared from the table entirely. During 
tlie Renaissance the principal delicacies were 
heron and peacock, the latter served sur- 
rounded by its beautiful tail. What sort of 
traditions do you mean?" 

"The traditions of which you are always 
hearing," I said, ''the old cuisine in distinction 
from what are called the 'creations' of the 
modern chefs of to-day, like 'pressed duck,' 
for instance — the caneton de Rouen a la prcssc. 
That, I suppose, is decidedly an invention of 
our time." 

"Pressed duck is very old," he said; "that 
is, I think it is about a century old. I know 
they ate it in Rouen fifty years ago. They 
have all kinds of specialties in the old cuisine 
of Proz'ence; thev have dishes that are ex- 
quisite." 

This is as near as I ever come to hav- 
ing defined for me exactly what is meant by 
the old French cuisine. I know that when I 
am invited to dinners given at certain res- 
taurants I take a subtle pleasure in the repast 
which I am told comes from old traditions, 
and when I dine at others I take an equally 
subtle pleasure — one that is said to be the 
result of the cuisine of a chef who is a "cre- 
ator." My own traditions of French cooking 
contain nothing but roasts, and are got prin- 
cipally from old books; such books, for in- 
stance, as Anatole France's "Rotisserie de 



ii6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

la Reine Pedauque." In that the father is an 
"excellent roaster who fears God," and on 
feast days carries the roasters' banner, em- 
broidered with a St. Laurence, with his grid- 
iron, and a golden palm. This was over a 
hundred years ago, and it speaks of a time 
when the preparation of food, in general, was 
elevated into a profession which was dignified 
and picturesque. The foundations of nearly 
all the French cuisine of to-day were laid at 
that period, I fancy, and what the famous old 
restaurants do is to hand down its prin- 
ciples from generation to generation, adding 
to them and perfecting them as they go along, 
but never going outside of them. 

This is the case with such old houses as 
the Cafe .Anglais and the Maison Doree on 
the Boulevards, or Voisin's in the Rue St. 
Honore. In these three there is a continuity 
of traditions, if not from father to son, at 
least from chef to under-chef. If you want 
to know what this means, linger long enough 
over your coffee some day at the Maison 
Doree to let the place empty,_ and then 
have a little talk with the old maitre d'hotel, 
Gustave, who has been thirty-three years with 
the house. He will approach the subject with 
something of the solemnity with which Fran- 
cisque Sarcey talked of the Comedie Fran- 
chaise. Gustave has one gesture when he 
wishes to be particularly impressive, a cir- 



THE RESTAURANTS. 117 

cular Vsrave of the hand ending with the fore- 
finger in the air. This is particularly in 
evidence when he speaks of some of the 
new restaurants in vogue. "It is art in 
decadence!" I heard him say lately. ''What 
can you expect of a restaurant which has no 
cellar? A wine-cellar must be at least fifty 
years old. Wine is like a woman. It takes a 
start of at least twenty years to make a wo- 
man. And then all people think of nowadays 
is the name. A piece of duck with a sauce put 
to it and called something a la Bernhardt, or 
a la Loie Fuller, is nothing but the same 
piece of duck, n'est-ce-pas? (forefinger very 
mxuch en I'air). It is no better for that. Eat a 
morsel of duck roasted here, 'a la broche,' as 
they did it fifty years ago, when M. Cassimir 
first came into the house, with a glass of our 
good old wine, or eat it at the Maison Voisin, 
and see if any name could make it any bet- 
ter." 

I ventured to remark to Gustave that I 
had heard his good old wines, as well as his 
dinner, were unduly dear; and this seemed 
to hurt his feelings. 

"That is because people do not know how 
to order," he answered indignantly. 'Tt is sad 
to see men commanding dinners who have 
no instinct for composing a menu. They 
order a tort or a travers, with no harmony in 
their compositions, and spend five times as 



ii8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

much as they need. Let them come to me, 
and I will cause them to dine well without 
spending so much as a louis — yes, and they 
will drink good wine, too." 

Nothing casts a deeper shade of melancholy 
over a factotum of an old restaurant like this 
than to see customers running against all 
their ideas of taste in their orders. "So Lord 
Lyons has arrived!" the old French chef of 
the Brevoort House would say delightedly in 
the old days when this famous gourmet was 
coming to New York. The cook always rec- 
ognized his hand in the superior menus which 
came down. 

The charm of a Paris restaurant comes not 
only from the table, but also from an aesthetic 
pleasure given in the way things are served, 
and the surroundings. I imagine food is just 
as exquisitely prepared in many other cities; 
but nowhere else is it made so generally en- 
tertaining. The man at the head of a leading 
Paris restaurant, who is always more or less 
of an artist, is past-master in getting effects 
from his resources; the brilliant white of his 
linen, the iridescence of his crystals, the pure 
intensity of his reds, the delicacy of his greens, 
the whole gamut of beautiful tones in be^ 
tween. His sensitive, cultivated eye is con- 
stantly seeking new combinations, and the 
successful restaurant always has his personal- 
ity in it. This is so essential to its success 



THE RESTAURANTS. 119 

that no restaurant ever keeps its vogue if it 
loses this special sort of individuality. As an 
instance of this, take the old Cafe Anglais. It 
is just as well-ordered at present as in the 
days of its highest popularity: its deUcious 
cuisine has in no way changed; but you never 
see a cat there, as the saying is, simply be- 
cause the restaurant has passed into the 
hands of an English syndicate. It is a house 
without a host. 

The Duval restaurants, scattered all over 
Paris, illustrate this same principle. They are 
cheap, it is true; but, as a matter of fact, there 
is no place in town where you can find certain 
dishes in greater perfection, x^n American 
painter whom I know, of broad experience in 
the delicate art of dining, tells me that he has 
been in the habit, for the last ten years, of 
going now and then to the head restaurant 
Duval, in the Rue Montesquieu, to eat a filet 
de bceuf with sauce Bearnaise. He always finds 
it the same, and perfect. It is evidently al- 
ways cooked by the same chef, for the blush 
of red in the centre never changes its size. 
This dish costs at Duval's ninety-five cen- 
times, and an excellent "grave superieur" to 
go with it, with a real bouquet, can be got for 
one franc twenty-five. You wonder why all 
Paris does not go there, but there is no 
aesthetic pleasure to be got at the Bouillon 
Duval. For the Frenchman the solid break 



i2« PARIS AS IT IS. 

in business hours in the middle of the day is 
something more than a mere opportunity for 
taking fuel. His dejeiiner is an ordered and 
interesting function, from which he expects 
to get some sort of an inspiration for going- 
through the rest of the day. I might say, 
however, in speaking of a Bouillon Duval, 
that it is one of the few places in Paris where 
women can go alone. 

Any study of the psychology of the Paris 
restaurant would be quite incomplete unless 
some account were taken of a certain yielding 
in all of them to end-of-the-century tendencies. 
You find even the gravest of the old steady- 
goers making concessions to the demand of 
to-day for ''features;" just as every now and 
then we open one of our old magazines to 
come with a little start upon some frankly 
journalistic article, with illustrations per- 
ceptibly leaning toward sensationalism. 

Nearly all the restaurants now go in for 
specialties. They always did, for that matter; 
but these are much more in evidence to-day. 
At Voisin's you will hear of their "chaud 
froids," their special terrines of pate-de-foie- 
gras, their filet with "sauce Choron," named 
after an old chef who was with the house 
thirty years. Durand, the famous Durand of 
Boulanger repute, makes a specialty of eggs. 
He serves some eighty dififerent dishes of 
them, and you can breakfast and dine there 




< 



THE RESTAURANTS. 121 

every day of the week and have eight 
courses at each meal, with eggs at every 
course, yet never have the same dish twice. 
Noel and Peters, in the Passage des Princes, 
have gone in for Russian dishes, and re- 
cently imported five Russian chefs from St. 
Petersburg. Marguery still lives on his sote ct 
la Normande, and holds all the provinces and 
some of Paris with it to such a degree that he 
keeps thirty-two chefs, and dries and polishes 
all his dishes by electricity. Paillard's and the 
Ambassadeurs in the Champs Elysees, with 
their flower-hung balconies, Madrid and 
Armenonville in the Bois de Boulogne will 
offer you all the features in cuisine that you 
will find anywhere else; but, above all, the 
loveliness of their surroundings makes them 
ever fashionable, and the principal specialty 
they have is that at any one of them you are 
sure to be amused. Foyot's, the old restau- 
rant near the Luxembourg, keeps that de- 
lightful air of tradition, with a sort of concen- 
trated essence of the schools, the galleries, 
and the Odeon lightly diffused through it 
which always has for me such a special fas- 
cination. A French friend of mine, wife of a 
professor, once a year dines en villc at Foyot's 
to celebrate her wedding anniversary. Long 
before the time, she and her husband begin 
to talk of the dinner, to compose the menu, to 
discuss the dishes of the anniversary before, 



122 PARIS AS IT IS. 

to make up their minds whether they will 
have the same table; and I never enter the 
door of Foyot's that I do not seem to see 
them sitting there enjoying their rare pleas- 
ure, after the fashion that Charles Lamb and 
his sister, Bridget Elia, enjoyed theirs in the 
early days when everything had to be 
counted, and when a purchase was not simply 
a purchase to them, but a triumph. 

As for the "features" at Joseph's, in the Rue 
Marivaux, and Frederic's, at the Tour d' Ar- 
gent, they are all features. Probably no man 
in his hne has ever been so much sung with 
his arms as Joseph, especially by Ameri- 
cans. People talked of his carving of a fowl 
with something of the religious respect with 
which they mentioned the bowing of a Sara- 
sate. Many a time have I seen him perform the 
feat, holding the bird aloft, poised on the fork 
in his left hand, and then wdth only four or 
five passes of his long, flexible knife leaving 
it wingless and legless. Two or three more, 
and nothing remained but a skeleton. These 
strokes were part of the mysterious rites 
which preceded the eating of "poidarde a la 
Marivaux'' or ''Caneton de Rouen a la Pressed 
The refinement of the cuisine could go no 
farther, I fancy, than in the preparation of 
the poularde. When ready for cooking the 
chicken was wrapped in the belly of a lamb, 
and then swathed in bacon long enough to let 



THE RESTAURANTS. 123 

the two impart to it their essences. Then it 
was steamed in the vapor of a quart bottle of 
port wine and a pint of old rye whiskey. Jo- 
seph has now gone to England to live, and 
only his shade remains in Paris. He never 
quite got back the prestige he lost for giving 
up pure considerations of art to accept $10,000 
a year from Mr. Vanderbilt. You will hear it 
said of him that he has lost the simplicity of 
the greatest art; that the dishes at the res- 
taurant which still bears his name are too sen- 
sational. They have too many decorations for 
effect, such things as an American flag in the 
centre of the dish, or lobster claws sticking up 
where claws ought not to be. 

Frederic, at the Tour d' Argent, attracts peo- 
ple to his simple little restaurant on the banks 
of the Seine because the famous specialty, 
''Caneton a la Presse/' is to be found there in 
its greatest perfection. The caneton, or young 
duckling of Rouen, is one of the greatest o^ 
French delicacies. It is what most nearly cor- 
responds in France to our canvas-back duck. 
A la presse means that after the duck is carved 
the entire skeleton is put into a great silver 
press and crushed before the very eyes of the 
diner. The juices in the bones are supposed to 
give a particularly delicious flavor to the sauce 
which is afterward made from this stock. 
To Frederic and Joseph must be given the 
glory of developing this dish to its present de- 



124 PARIS AS IT IS. 

gree of perfection, and giving it the exalted place 
it now holds in the cuisine of to-day. Its 
story is interesting as a document in culinary 
history. In the early sixties duck was pressed 
in Paris, but only between two plates, and then 
not for everybody. You had to be a Roths- 
child or a prince to have it done for you; and 
in no book on Paris of that date have I ever 
seen the dish mentioned. In '68 both Joseph 
and Frederic, in two different houses, were 
making themselves remarked for "caneton h la 
presse." It was not until the early seventies 
that the press of to-day was invented. What 
a curious bit of sociological history is com- 
prised in the reminiscences of these chefs! "It 
was in '74," Frederic told me once, "that my 
role in the duck began. I then began to 
search in its juices and its carcass the refined 
duck that I serve now. When M. Paillard 
sold me the 'Tour d'Argent' I was searching 
still. Only lately have I been satisfied. Now 
I search no more.'' 

The quaint Tour d'Argent is the only place I 
know of in Paris where you can find now a 
chef who is representative of the old type; 
that is to say, a man who is at once cook, 
maitre d'hotel and proprietor. Frederic 
evolves his creations in the watches of 
the night, and executes them the next 
day without ever tasting them. His art 
seems to be purely intellectual. His famous 



THE RESTAURANTS. 125 

"sole a la cardinal," his Poulct Madame Mackay, 
his Homard Alexander, his Oeufs Tuck, his 
Beignet Princesse Colona, his Poire Wanamaker, 
all of those dishes which possibly make the 
cuisine sensational, but at least make it amus- 
ing, are, so far as he is concerned, pure works 
of the imagination. 

Less and less, however, as I said in the be- 
ginning, is a Paris restaurant considered from 
anything but a social standpoint. The res- 
taurants are the last of the "salons ok Von 
cause." The art of conversation is dropping out 
of the French salons. Music, monologues, 
revues, comedies, dances, the whole Bodi- 
niere, and perhaps it might have been said, in 
these late troublous times, anything that will 
amuse — that would keep the guests safely on 
neutral ground, is coming in, but nobody ex- 
pects to talk. 

An entire book could be written upon the 
famous restaurant dinners of the Nineteenth 
Century, as books have been written upon the 
salons of the Eighteenth. Some of these have 
come to be almost as much Parisian institu- 
tions as the Academy. Think of a continuity 
of dinner traditions that has lasted for over 
half a century ! The most famous of these din- 
ners had its beginning in the days when *'Phil- 
lipe's" was the restaurant^ la mode, in the time 
when George Sand was dining at a cabaret 
with Alfred de Musset. A few briUiant men 



126 PARIS AS IT IS. 

got into the habit of meeting together once a 
month for a dinner at PhilHpe's, which he 
called the ''Dhicr des Gens d' esprit.'' "To-day 
I have my gens d'esprit/' he would say. 

The convives called it simply "The Friday 
Dinner" — ''le diner du Vendredi." They met 
on the first Friday of each month, and their 
number was limited to twenty. They were 
of Brillat-Savarin's opinion about large din- 
ners. People did not dine, he said, at them — 
they banqueted; and they did not talk — they 
toasted. In 1856, on the death of M. Bixio, a 
charming and brilliant man, who had been the 
principal founder of the Friday dinners, these 
were formally baptized Diner Bixio. At that 
time among the members, to quote alphabetic- 
ally, were such names as Arago, Augier, Dela- 
croix, Dumas, pere; Halevy, Messionier, Pros- 
per Merimee, and the actor Regnier. Nearly 
every celebrated Frenchman has been of the 
number since. 

In March, 1898, the Hst of m.embers in- 
cluded the Prince d'Arenberg, Gaston Bois- 
sier, Victor CherbuHez, Jules Claretie, De- 
taille, General de GalHfet, Gerome, Ludovic 
Halevy, Massenet, Pailleron, Sardou, Mel- 
chior de Vogue, Raymond Poincare. The 
dinner is always given at Voisin's, in that 
famous salon of the second Empire, the 
Grand Seise. What a record of the best 
French esprit those walls could give! They 



THE RESTAURANTS. 127 

have heard the famous conversations between 
Tourgenieff and Alexandre Dumas His, and 
the famous narrations of that rare story- 
teller, the Due d'Aumale, and the equally 
famous repartee of Labiche. One specimen 
of this last has come to me. 

Labiche had once owned a farm, and was 
boasting of the stock he had raised on it — 
cows which gave eighteen quarts of milk a day. 

''Eighteen quarts a day, my dear Labiche," 
spoke up a good Republican present, remem- 
bering suddenly that he was editor of an 
agricultural paper. "Eighteen quarts; that's 
a good deal!" 

"But, you know, it was under the Empire!" 



The Great Shops, 

"Come, Mademoiselle!" said the professor 
to the young girl who was taking the examina- 
tion for a teacher's certificate, "where was 
Charles the Ninth when he fired upon the Hu- 
guenots on St. Bartholomew's day?" 

The unfortunate candidate flushed, looked 
dazed, and then suddenly answered triumph- 
antly: "In a window of the Bon Marche!' 

The idea of the Louvre had evidently gone 
through her mind, but as the word Louvre 
suggested above everything else the shop 
where she went so often, the equivalent Bon 
Marche suggested itself instinctively. 

This might be said to represent the frame of 
mind of nearly every woman in Paris. The 
Louvre evokes far less for them the vision of 
the great palace of galleries than that of the 
large building opposite with staring posters 
across its front bearing such legends as: 
"Nouveautes dliiver," "Grande Exposition de 
Blanc,'' ''Saison d'Ete.'' The left bank of the 
Seine is symbolized for the inhabitants of her 
right not nearly so much by the Latin Quarter 
or even the aristocratic Faubourg St. Ger- 
main as by the gigantic Bon Marche, gorged 

128 



THE GREAT SHOPS. 129 

not only with all the necessities of life, but 
what V^oltaire called more necessary still, the 
superfluities. The Printemps brings up not 
nearly so much the blossoming of the flowers 
as sky-blue posters announcing b)argain days 
for gloves, laces or silks. 

What an important part of the history of the 
Second Empire and the Tliird Republic would 
have been left out if Zola had not written "Ait 
Bonheiir dcs Dames,'' the history of one of 
these great shops! They are one of the most 
important inventions of this century, most 
characteristic of its sociolagical evolution. 
Those who only see in their astonishing pros- 
perity the individual genius of business men 
like Boucicaut of the Bon Marche, Chauchard 
or Heriot of the Loiivrc, Jaluzot of the Prin- 
temps, who came to Paris in sabots, do not 
look below the surface of things for the spirit 
of the age. 

Such bazars are the outcome of the social 
necessities of modern times, in which the motto 
is, not more equahty for all than luxury for 
all. They were inevitable consequences of the 
Revolution and the suppression of the corpo- 
rations. In the First Empire appeared shops 
which soon became famous, La Fille Mai Gar- 
dee, Le Diable Boiteux, Le Masque de Per 
or Les Deux Magots. After the revolution of 
1830 they gave place to others still larger and 
more popular; La Belle Fermiere, La Chaussee 



130 PARIS AS IT IS. 

d'Antin, Le Coin de La Rue, Le Pauvre D table. 
And at the same time two new types ap- 
peared; the clerk and the "demoiselle de mag- 
azin," who are chaffed in the popular songs 
and on the stage as "Calico" and "Mile. Per- 
caline/' 

At the end of the Second Empire liberal 
ideas made immense progress. All classes of 
society were stirred by them, from the high- 
est to the lowest. In this last a little clerk left 
a little shop to go into partnership with the 
proprietor of another little shop in the Rue du 
Bac called the ''Bon Marche."' His name was 
Aristide Boucicaut; and his was one of those 
creative minds which revolutionize the world. 
All his genius lay in a few principles — to sup- 
press bargaining by a fixed price, to sell at re- 
tail for almost the same price as at wholesale 
and make up the difference by the quantity of 
the sales; finally, to interest the employes in 
the business by a commission. Seventeen 
years later his house had swallowed up all the 
immense space between the Rues de Sevres, 
Valpeau, du Bac and de Babylone. Lately it 
has crossed this last street and begun to spread 
out on the other side, and the business it does 
every year amounts to over a hundred millions 
of francs. 

The Louvre was founded by M. Chauchard, 
a clerk of the Pauvre Diable, who made a busi- 
ness partnership with M. Heriot, head clerk at 




The Alagazin du Printemps. 




The Bon Marche and Square. 
TWO GREAT FRENCH DEPARTMENT STORES. 



THE GREAT SHOPS. 131 

the silk counter of the Ville de Paris, whom he 
got to know through the intermediary of his 
barber. They only applied the same ideas, 
which proves that they were in the air. Now 
M. Chauchard is one of the French million- 
aires, and best known as the owner of the pic- 
ture gallery which is the most difficult of ac- 
cess in Paris. It contains Millet's Angelus. 
And all over town in each quarter other great 
shops have sprung up, miniatures of the fa- 
mous ones; the Samaritainc, the Place Clichy, 
the Pharcs de la Bastille, the Tapis Rouge, the 
Soldat Laboreur, etc. 

The Louvre and the Bon Marche alone have 
put feverish activity into great looms and great 
industries all over France. Not only have they 
put new life into the silks of Lyons, the laces 
of Puy and of Calais, the glove manufactories 
of Grenoble and of Chaumont (1,500,000 pairs 
of gloves are sold every year at the Bon 
Marche alone), the woods of Roubaix and of 
Rheims, the draperies of Sedan and Elbeuf, 
the linen of the Vosges, of Cambrai and of 
Armentieres, but they have founded whole 
new industries. The Louvre has carried to 
St. Etienne the manufacture of certain foreign 
velvets, has replaced the toys of Nuremberg 
by French toys, and has created in the Hautes 
Pyrenees, where there is the beautiful Pyre- 
nees wool, the old industry of knitting of 



132 PARIS AS IT IS. 

which Berlin and Kremnitz only fifteen years 
ago had the monopoly. 

These great shops have had still another im- 
portant influence in France. They have had 
much more effect than you would imagine on 
the relations between labor and capital. The 
spectacle of these immense organizations in 
which all the gains are divided mathematically 
between all the employes in direct proportion 
to their activity has gained many minds to col- 
lectivism. The Bon Marchc, for instance, in 
one sense of the word constitutes a perfect lit- 
tle socialistic republic. It is governed by a 
triumvirate of directors chosen from among 
its own members, who have mounted suc- 
cessively every round of the ladder for a term 
of three years, and are ineligible for reelection. 
Every employe receives not only a salary, but 
a percentage of the yearly profits. The house 
has a restaurant on the top floor, where its 
employes are fed; it has comfortable dormi- 
tories where they live. This vision has gained 
many minds to socialism. They forget that 
this Republic is made up of chosen individ- 
uals, and that an undesirable employe is put 
out of it at the very beginning. This process 
of discrimination would be very difficult for a 
State. 

As to the part these great shops have played 
in the evolution of manners in Paris, it would 
certainly make a curious study. One simple 



THE GREAT SHOPS. 133 

little custom introduced by the Bon Marche 
has had a most impiortant ethical influence on 
the modern French ^feminine mind. This is 
its practice of allowing customers to send 
goods home to be examined at leisure, and 
paid for only if they are kept. A great many 
women with no money at all in this way give 
themselves the illusion of having large for- 
tunes. They enter this palace full of treasures, 
have the joy of handling and choosing them, 
and sending home the value of several hun- 
dred francs' worth — francs which they have 
not got. These they keep for three or four 
days and then return, or keep only a trifle. We 
have all seen entire families going to the circus 
to take one small child, and I have known of 
a woman's flanking one modest saucepan of 
which she was in need with seven hundred 
francs' worth of laces, underlinen and bibelots 
she had no intention of buying at all. She 
takes at the door that little book of numbers 
which facilitates shopping to such an extraor- 
dinary degree, and when she admires anything 
has only to hand this to the clerk and let him 
put on the number to feel that it is hers. What 
a strangely constructed intellect it must be that 
gets pleasure from this sort of thing. It must 
be of the same species as that of the woman 
who could not believe that her bank account 
was exhausted because her book was still half 
full of checks. 



134 PARIS AS IT IS. 

The Bon Marche is a close student of the 
feminine character, as women sometimes find 
out to their sorrow. One in modest circum- 
stances who had given herself the illusion of 
luxury by having a very elegant fur cape sent 
home, when she went to return it was met with 
the statement: ''Unfortunately, madam, we 
cannot take this back. An employe of the 
house sat directly behind you yesterday at a 
wedding and saw you wearing it." I have al- 
ways wondered what the sequel was, and if it 
was one of those feminine tragedies we some- 
times find in French literature. Do you re- 
member the story — was it by Guy de Maupas- 
sant — where the woman borrowed a friend's 
diamond necklace to wear to a ball and lost 
it, and returned a fac-simile of it? She 
and her husband impoverished themselves, 
ran into debt, and spent all their lives 
making this up. Finally, when they were 
old and gray they met the friend and 
told her the story. She burst into tears. 
''Why, my dear, the diamonds were paste!" 
she said. I always imagine the woman of the 
fur cape not telling her husband, and then hav- 
ing to skimp and save out of her allowance for 
indefinite years, for the French women always 
have allowances. The family income is always 
tithed religiously among people in ordinary 
circumstances, and in the expense books you 
will find awful little tables giving calculations 



THE GREAT SHOPS. 135 

for thrifty housewives — and they are nearly all 
thrifty in France; a family with an income of 
10,000 francs should spend so much for rent, 
so much for food, so much for pleasures, and 
so on. How could the great shops combat all 
this system except with immense temptations? 
They do not seem to me such dangerously 
seductive places as the great American shops. 
They have not the same distinction. Go into a 
New York shop at the dawning of a season 
and you will feel that the things so daintily 
displayed everywhere are going to be worn 
by the most distinguished women through- 
out the length and breadth of the land. 
You do not get that sensation at the Louvre 
or the Bon Marche. As they are great level- 
ers, the dressmakers are always trying to keep 
their models and materials out of them, and as 
Paris is the centre of supplies, even the hum- 
blest dressmaker sells her materials. You 
gain nothing in buying yourself, because she 
saves the middleman. The great shops in New 
York are importers of both dresses and stufifs, 
and have the best fashions. The great shops 
in France may dress the provinces. They do 
not dress Paris. You never get a style there 
until after it has been popularized, and there- 
fore commonized. 

But what a delight is the sensation they give 
you of the shop's being made for woman, and 
not woman for the shop. Their amiability. 



136 PARIS AS IT IS. 

their obligingness, is unbounded. Have you 
bought two or three yards of dotted musHn, 
for instance, to cover your dressing-table, and 
then decided you do not want it? Take 
the muslin back and the money will be re- 
funded to you. The shop likes to have you 
think yourself economical, and it must have 
you satisfied. Moreover, it is always trust- 
worthy and sincere. All the shops are large 
importers of Oriental stuffs and curios; the 
Bon Marche is one of the largest in the world. 
You can often ''junk" there with satisfaction. 
The great shops play their part in the pag- 
eants of the capital. At least once a year femi- 
nine Paris rises early in the morning and goes 
over to the Bon Marche lace sale in February. 
It is the first suggestion of spring; the great 
place blossoming with lilacs, crocuses, ane- 
mones and violets — artificial, to be sure, but 
the exquisite artificiality of the French — and 
masses of stufYs, ribbons and gloves strewn 
everywhere in the most intelligent disorder, 
and the most artistic spring harmonies. On 
the twentieth of March, the legendary day 
when the old chestnut tree of the Tuileries first 
puts forth its leaves, the Prinfcmps gives away 
25,000 bouquets of violets. Every day the 
Louvre gives the children balloons, 500 of 
them, which float through Paris. The Samari- 
taine down by the old quay has taken a curi- 
ous way of combatting the prejudice among 



THE GREAT SHOPS. 137 

the poorer classes against buying on Friday. 
Every Friday it gives away a teacup or a sugar 
bowl or a tray. 

' The ethical influence of the great shops lies 
especially in the envy of luxury and the need 
for it in all classes which they create, which 
always means a refinement of taste. This uni- 
versal standard of taste which is so character- 
istic of Paris is principally the result of the 
daily sight of beautiful things. And one of 
the beautiful visions for many millions of souls 
in France is the admirable contrasts of color, 
the intelligent profusion of rich and rare things 
which fill the eyes at the Louvre and the Bon 
Marche. 



PART II. 
THE RULERS OF PARIS 



The Chavtber of Deputies, 

Everybody in France talks politics. This 
does not mean that the Government is popu- 
lar, but that it is ubiquitous. Ten times a 
day, in every sort of place, from a salon to an 
omnibus, you are sure to hear the inevitable: 
'Tf I were the Government!" The strange 
thing is that while everybody talks politics 
you never meet anyone who seems to be 
really interested in it — unless it be some 
one like your concierge. The man in the 
street is the only one who still has some of 
that hope which triumphs over experience 
and which is so necessary for political ardor. 
Nobody else believes in politics. One of my 
friends tells me that he has voted, from a 
sense of duty, every four years all his life for 
a Deputy, but has never had the good fortune 
to see a sins^le one of his candidates elected. 
This, he said, was because the choice of a 
Deputy was always determined by some little 
side issue which appealed to the people, out- 
side of any real question at stake. "If the 
people in the quarter of the Rue de Bac want 
a gutter," he went on, "it is the man who 
promises them a gutter who is elected. You 

141 



142 PARIS AS IT IS. 

may be sure your concierge has his own little 
plan for reform and improvement, and he 
will cast his ballot for the man through whom 
he thinks he will get it." 

To test this statement, one day I questioned 
the Cerberus who guards my dwelling about 
his political faith. He began by protesting 
that he knew nothing about politics; and in 
this statement he was confirmed by his wife, 
really much the better man of the two, who 
kept reiterating with emphasis, "Francois ne 
se connait pas du tout en politique." I 
finally extracted that Francois did vote, and 
always for the man who was '"for the people." 
In the last election this had meant the candi- 
date who promised a new covered market to 
the quarter. No one, I am sure, who has 
ever strolled of a Wednesday or a Saturday 
morning along the banks of the Seine in the 
sixteenth arrondissement can have any doubt 
that we need a new market, and covered; 
but as the need has been contemporary with 
the existence of this part of town itself, I can 
easily see why only a small number of its in- 
habitants would ever have faith that any elec- 
tion would bring it to us. The man of the 
I)eople votes because in that way he feels that 
he is exercising his rights of citizenship. But 
among the other classes there is generally the 
greatest indifference over elections, and only 
a fifth of the voters ever go to the polls. 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 143 

For this reason the various wards of Paris 
find themselves represented in the Chamber 
by men who are neither typical of their con- 
stituents nor in accord with each other on 
any common purpose. For instance, an aris- 
tocrat like the Comte de Sabran Pontaves 
stands for la Villette, whose population is al- 
most entirely made up of butchers; and a 
Socialist like Viviani is the mouthpiece of the 
quarter of the Schools. The same principle 
holds true in the provinces. I know of a 
Deputy in Brittany, Cosmao-Dumanet, who 
has been returned to the Chamber for fifteen 
years simply because he once proposed a law 
— impossible to be put into execution, more- 
over — for adding each week to the rations of 
the soldiers a single sardine. Among the 
fishing populace of Finistere this has been 
enough to make his whole political fortune. 
It is the single act of his life, but it is suffi- 
cient. His position is unshakable. 

The time was, in the early days of the Re- 
public, when the Deputies busied themselves 
over real things. Then they Vv^ere engaged in 
a series of hand-to-hand duels, as it were, 
with an ever-threatening monarchy. Even up 
to as late as 1889 there were two hundred 
Monarchist Deputies in the Chamber, and 
France was divided into two distinct parties; 
Legitimists, Orleanists and Imperialists on 
the one side; Conservative, Progressive and 



144 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Radical Republicans on the other — these last 
united on Republican principles, but very 
much at odds on the question of just what 
kind of a Republic they wanted, and how to 
make it. To-day, out of the 568 Deputies, 
there are only forty-four Monarchists. Even 
Comte Boni de Castellane, with his political 
inheritance, took his seat in the Chamber, 
not as a Monarchist, but as a Progressive 
Repubhcan. Now that the lawmakers of the 
country are no longer united on vital ques- 
tions, the greater part of them have come 
to be more or less professional politicians, 
principally occupied in keeping their seats. 

Two important traits of the French char- 
acter shine forth conspicuously in a Deputy. 
The first is a Frenchman's horror of any au- 
thority to which he must submit; and the sec- 
ond his love for any he exercises. No sooner 
has he taken his seat in the Chamber than he 
begins to take advantage of his new powder in 
every possible way. At his pleasure he can 
propose any bill or project for a law which 
comes into his head, and can interpellate the 
ministry on anything he pleases, from its gen- 
eral policy dov/n to the reason why the doors 
of the railway carriages will not stay shut, or 
why the evening before such and such a street 
was blocked by traffic. Therefore, one of the 
principal means by which Deputies make 
political capital is by some absurd interpella- 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 145 

tion of the Government which will make them 
talked about; or by some amusing or abusive 
interruption of a speech which will attract at- 
tention in the official report of a session, and 
make the people at home think they are rep- 
resented at the capital by a great man. It is 
hardly necessary to say that the number of 
laws and the number of interpellations pro- 
posed is always something enormous. From 
1893 to 1898 two hundred interpellations 
were discussed. 

As an instance of the practical working of 
these prerogatives, take the question of the 
sous-prefets, which absorbed so much atten- 
tion in the last Chamber. The role of the 
prefet is almost entirely representative, and 
he does not need an assistant. As in all 
countries, the questions that most appeal to 
the people are naturally those of reform and 
economy; and when the hard-pressed legis- 
lator looks about him for reforms to pro- 
pose, the only thing he can ever think of is to 
suppress the sous-prefets. His efforts at 
economy remind me of a remark an Ameri- 
can woman I once knew made to me on the 
same subject. She wanted to economize, she 
said, and she was thinking of taking up smok- 
ing. ''How could taking up smoking possibly 
help you?" I asked. **'Well," she answered, 
"every man I ever saw who thought of econ- 
omizing always said he was going to give up 



146 PARIS AS IT IS. 

smoking. And as that was the only thing I 
could think of that I could give up, I thought 
I would better begin it." In the same way, 
the French Deputy, if he wanted to make any 
real economies, would have to take up some- 
thing, for there is not much with which the 
Constitution would allow him to do away. 
To give up the sous-prefets, he would first 
have to reform the Constitution. This does 
not in the least prevent the question of abol- 
ishing them from coming up in the Chamber 
with periodical regularity. Ten years ago the 
Freycinet ministry fell because the Right 
joined with the Radicals to refuse the appro- 
priations for the sous-prefectures. This 
was then as it is to-day entirely a matter of 
legislative sparring, and I do not know any 
better way of shovv'ing how this game of fenc- 
ing still goes on now, as it probably will go on 
ten years from now, than through this extract 
from the Figaro of a few days ago by Alfred 
Capus, one of the ''funny men" on that paper 
who gets his reputation principally by chaff- 
ing the Government: 

THE QUESTION OF THE SOUS-PREFETS. 

The Senator: I am listening, my dear 
Deputy. 

The Deputy: This is the point. This ques- 
tion of the sous-prefets is coming up again in 
the Chamber. 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 147 

The Senator: As it does every year? 

The Deputy: Yes, but this time it will have 
exceptional gravity. The only thing our con- 
stituents talk of is economy. They do noth- 
ing but demand economy, reductions in the 
budget. 

The Senator: They are quite right. 

The Deputy: They are a thousand times 
right; we are running up against a blank wall. 
Now, from this point of view it is evident that 
the suppression of the sous-prefets would be 
an excellent thing. These functionaries, we 
can say between ourselves, are completely 
useless to-day. 

Tlie Senator: Absolutely useless — unless 
perhaps at election time, when they render 
us a few services. 

The Deputy: Yes, then it's certain that 
they do render us certain services, and suffi- 
ciently important ones. But it is impossible 
to say to our electors: ''The sous-prefet is 
nothing but an electoral agent." It might 
sound a little cynical. 

The Senator: Just a Httle cynical — yes. 

The Deputy: The elector, in general, sees 
in this question only a possible reform. And 
we are obliged to satisfy him. Here is why 
I am going to stand for the suppression of the 
sous-prefets, and with firmness; but before 
voting there is one thing I should like to 



148 PARIS AS IT IS. 

know. If the bill passes the Chamber, the 
Senate is sure to reject it, is it not? 

The Senator: Oh, perfectly sure. 

The Deputy: You promise me this? 

The Senator: I promise you. 

The Deputy: Because, you understand, I 
am quite willing to vote at the Chamber to 
show my electors that I am a partisan of 
economy, but on condition that I am sure 
the measure will not pass the Senate. 

The Senator: You may count on it. You 
have my word. 

The Deputy: Imagine me without a sous- 
prefet at the next elections! 

The Senator: The very idea makes me 
shudder. . 

The Deputy: Thanks once more. I shall 
vote with all the energy possible. 

This is an epitome of French legislation. 
Coquehn Cadet, in one of his monologues, 
gives another. He presents himself as the 
model Deputy. "Do you ask me of what 
party I am?" he says. ''Nothing could be 
easier to answer. I am of the party of my 
electors! And as for reform, I am for all 
the reforms; but for one in particular I have 
had an idea that savors of genius. As the 
Senators always undo everything the Depu- 
ties do, and the Deputies everything the 
Senate does, I propose putting all the Depu- 
ties into the Senate, and all the Senators into 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 149 

the Chamber. That will solve the problem 
and then we can accomplish something." 

It is as much as ever that any legislation at 
all comes otit of these poHtical gymnastics, 
v\'hich are principally used to overturn the 
Government. Lord Brougham once said: 
"Happily France has a revolution every fif- 
teen years; without that she would be the 
first of nations." Now that she has been 
twice fifteen years without making a revolu- 
tion, her rivals can say: "Happily France 
changes her ministry every eight months; 
without that no one knows what she might 
become." In the last twenty-seven years she 
has had twenty-six Ministers of Foreign Af- 
fairs and thirty-one of the Interior. *T am 
nothing but an old umbrella which has re- 
ceived m.any showers," was the witty remark 
of a Minister not long ago. It is easy to see 
that no consistent general policy can be kept 
up when every six months or so an entire 
change in the direction not only stops every- 
thing that has been begun, but substitutes a 
radically new set of ideas for those that are in 
process of execution. Somebody has called the 
Chamber a "Congress of Ambassadors." No 
sort of majority is ever to be depended upon. 
The Ministry, instead of giving its attention 
to great and important questions, is obHged 
to fight constantly for its existence by con- 
ciUating this or that or the other adversary 



ISO PARIS AS IT IS. 

in order to keep the executive machine going 
on. A typical instance of this was seen lately 
when Waldeck-Rousseau allowed the Social- 
ists to carry their red flag at the unveiling of 
the statue to Dalou, the "Triumph of the 
Republic." Any concession to socialism al- 
ways alarms the Conservative element of the 
Chamber, and the Waldeck-Rousseau Minis- 
try in consequence only escaped falling by the 
skin of its teeth, while if it had not given 
the permission, it would equally have risked 
being overturned by the extreme Left. 

The root of the trouble is that France has 
quite wandered away from the Constitution, 
made in 1875, and admirably adapted to her 
present needs. This provides that power 
shall be of two sorts: legislative, vested in 
the Senate and the Chamber; and ad- 
ministrative, vested in the Ministry. As a 
matter of fact, the Ministry only executes 
such lavv^s as the Chamber allows, and cus- 
tom forces it to resign every time it is not 
supported by a majority of the Chamber. 
For a long time this was necessary in 
the fight against monarchy, when the Cham- 
ber had, as it were, to feel its way along 
and be sure that the country was with it; but 
it is fatal to-day, when this habit has been 
turned into nothing but a means of con- 
stantly hampering and teasing the Govern- 
p:]ent. Safety for the country lies only in th? 



THE CHAMBER OE DEPUTIES. 151 

Ministry called for by the Constitution; 
homogeneous, that is to say, composed of 
members having common aims and a com- 
mon programme of foreign and domestic 
policy, for which they are responsible not 
only to the Chamber, but to the Senate, and, 
above all, a Ministry responsible to the legis- 
lature only for its general policy. Now the 
Ministry stands or falls purely at the caprice 
of groups, on trivial issues. Why should the 
Freycinet Ministry have resigned ten years 
ago on the question of the sous-prefets, sim- 
ply because it was the caprice of the Right to 
unite with the Radicals to refuse the appro- 
priations for the sous-prefectures? This was 
pure teasing. It could have no practical re- 
sult. Later the Tirard Ministry resigned 
because it pleased this same Right to demand 
an immediate revision of the Constitution; 
and when the Floquet Ministry came in and 
naturally put revision into its programme, the 
Right capriciously voted to adjourn revision 
indefinitely, and the Floquet Ministry went 
out in its turn. 

In this way France is rapidly faUing under 
what Jefferson feared for the United States. 
He called it "the tyranny of the legislators." 
Instead of having one sovereign, she has 568. 
What the French most admire in our Repub- 
lic is, as expressed by M. Paul Deschanel, 
President of the Chamber, "the wisdom and 



152 PARIS AS IT IS. 

moderation with which this great American 
people has, to use the words of Webster, 
'spontaneously limited its own sovereignty 
and put boundaries to it.' " 

But when France begins to think of estab- 
lishing a Government like ours, she finds her- 
self face to face with great problems which we 
have not. In the midst of the heavily-armed 
peoples of Europe she must keep up an enor- 
mous standing army, in the very nature of its 
organization a constant menace to republican 
principles. To add to the prerogatives of the 
President and make him "chief of the army," 
as ours is, seconded by Ministers irrespon- 
sible before the two legislative bodies, would 
be a serious danger with a people so easily 
carried away as the French. Another vital 
objection would be found in the centralization 
of her Government, so difficult for us to 
understand. Imagine, for instance, that it 
was the Government at Washington who de- 
cided just how many churches there should 
be in every town in the United States, and 
how they should be managed; and who di- 
rected every educational institution in the 
country, so that a mother with a son away 
at school or college would have to write to 
the capital to make so small a complaint as 
that her boy's clothes were not mended 
properly. I have seen lately a letter of this 
sort in the Paris papers. With us a thousand 




Q 



ffi 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 153 

intermediary forces break the central power, 
and therefore not only guarantee the respect 
of individual liberty but preserve the country 
from coups d'etat. Every part of France is 
subject to exactly the same laws, and the 
Government interferes at every turn with 
private life. If at the head of this were a 
President with the perogatives of ours, the- 
creature of a victorious power, aided by Min- 
isters free to abuse their power during four 
years, existence would become impossible. 
Between two tyrannies France prefers that 
of the 568. 

The French Chamber is a less interesting 
place to visit, to my mind, than either the 
House of Commons or the House in Wash- 
ington, and the reason of this is because of 
the political methods of this body of sover- 
eigns. The details of their proceedings are 
not interesting. Its members, though not 
brilliant orators, are generally clever speak- 
ers. Of such, for instance, is a man like 
Brisson, who developed political sparring 
into a fine art in defending the Empire, or 
Paschal Grousset, who became equally skill- 
ful in trying to demolish the Republic. 
Many of the younger Deputies are graduates 
of the !£cole des Hautes-fitudes Politique, 
or have learned political fencing in what is 
called the Mole School; a curious institu- 
tion invented by ambitious young lawyers, 



154 PARIS AS IT IS. 

where a hall is divided into Right and 
Left, and imaginary bills are proposed and 
attacked. Poincare, Barthou, Deschanel, 
Jaures, Millerand, men of great political rep- 
utation, in spite of the fact that none of them 
is yet over forty, are Parisians who have skil- 
fully and prudently worked up their political 
careers. The great mass of the Deputies is 
made up of the most widely dififering types, 
according to whether they are men who have 
gone into politics through ambition, through 
interest, by chance or as a sort of sport, ac- 
cording to the party to which they belong, 
and according to whether they are Parisians 
or provincials. These last, too, vary with 
the part of the country from which they 
come. Maurice Barres, in a recent novel 
called "Les Deracines," has painted in a re- 
markable manner the young provincial who 
tears himself away from his native soil and 
comes to Paris to seek his political fortune, 
and the world in which he finds himself, 
seething with ideas, and filled with a strug- 
gling mass of men who have long since fath- 
omed all the possible means of ''arriving." 

French politics have now so fallen into the 
hands of professionals that to see an every- 
day individual trying his hand at them gives 
you somewhat the sensation that you have 
when you see an amateur trying to play 
some gentle, peaceful home tune in a modern 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 155 

salon at a musical matinee, with its pro- 
gramme of artists. The common people take 
a real interest in politics. They subscribe to 
a sou paper and follow its political color. It 
is the 'Tetit Journal," ''L'intransigeant," "La 
Libre Parole," which rule the workingman 
and make public opinion among the lower 
classes of Paris in which are nearly all the 
voters. This is the reason why the capital is 
so generally represented in the House by 
''Chauvinists," or NationaHsts and SociaHsts, 
as they are now called. They are the mili- 
tary party. 

Every one talks politics, however, as I said 
in the beginning. Abel Hermant in his new 
play, ''Le Faubourg,'" represents it as as much 
a subject of conversation in the Faubourg 
St. Germain as it is everywhere else. "What 
we need is good Republicans — brought up 
by the Jesuits!" is one of the mots of the 
piece. It all ends in talk. The Monarchists 
live in a dream; the actual regime does not 
interest them, and they live upon visions of a 
new monarchy. And, outside of professional 
politicians, the Socialists live in just as much 
of a dream. In talking with a leading Social- 
ist not long ago, he told me he had no 
political opinions. He is waiting, like all of 
his faith, for a new order of society; and 
meanwhile he lives outside of the one that 
exists. 



156 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Meanwhile, the Government goes on as 
best it can with its brave task of reconciling 
all these elements and holding up the Repub- 
lic, as every other monarchical country in 
Europe will have to do when, in the course 
and sweep of the modern movement, its time 
will have come for trying to establish some- 
thing representing liberty, equality and fra- 
ternity on the ruins of its old self. The Gov- 
ernment has its own way of doing this, and 
it is generally incomprehensible to the 
amazed world looking on. It lets a man 
like Guerin go on protesting against the 
existing order of things by having a little 
"private five o'clock revolution," and calling 
his house "Fort Chabrol," because it knows 
that it has no constitutional right to shed 
Guerin's blood for a thing of this sort, and 
if it does it will be sure to fall. It does not 
want to fall because it has something else to 
do. It knows that the real danger for France 
does not lie in a monarchic revolution, but 
in a coup d'etat by some daring person 
who may take advantage of the general in- 
difference to establish a dictatorship. It was 
for this reason that the High Court was sum- 
moned. It was not because of a monarchist 
plot — there is always a monarchist plot, and 
it never has any chance of succeeding — but 
because Deroulede, acquitted by the Civil 
Court, and his attempt to persuade General 



THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES. 157 

Roget to march to the Elysee tacitly ap- 
proved therefore by the Jury of the Seine — 
and this means by the common people of 
Paris — set an example which was a real dan- 
ger for the Republic. The real object of the 
summoning of the Haute Cour was purely 
to disqualify Deroulede. 

Perhaps some day, not far oflf, France will 
succeed in bringing about the radical reforms 
she needs for carrying on her RepubHc, such 
as diminishing the number of Deputies, in- 
creasing the prerogatives of the Senate, and 
persuading the President to use more fre- 
quently his power of suspending or dissolving 
the Chamber or both houses. Perhaps some 
day, not far off, we shall see her set up a dic- 
tatorship. Who knows! The great mass of 
the people do not want a change, to disor- 
ganize the existing order of things, and in- 
crease all the difficulties of the struggle for 
existence; but if it came they would probably 
accept it quietly, for their interests are out- 
side of poHtics, and they do not much care 
how they are governed. 



The Elysee, 



Nothing in France is harder for Americans 
to understand than her President. We expect 
to find a French President fiUing some such 
place as ours at home. I well remember the 
first time I was in Paris during a presidential 
election. In view of the general upturning 
of the country from one end to the other 
which such a thing means to us, I looked for 
something extraordinary from the French in 
the way of demonstration, and when nothing 
happened at all, it was almost impossible not 
to feel a little defrauded. Paris did not even 
seem enough interested in her new Chief 
Magistrate to go out to the Champs Elysees 
to watch him driving back in triumph from 
Versailles. And I remarked once more that 
the French were an extraordinary people, and 
that it was invariably the unexpected which 
happened with them; without stopping to 
think that the expected in every country is 
only what, from our own standpoint, we 
expect. 

This is not so much due to a difiference of 
temperament between the French and our- 
selves as it is to a difference of condi- 

158 



THE ELY SEE. 159 

tions. The Frenchman does not excite him- 
self over his presidential candidate, for the 
simple reason that he seldom has a candidate. 
The President of France is the representative 
of the people, but he is not elected by the peo- 
ple. He is chosen only by the two Chambers, 
and up to the very day he is sworn into office 
he has often never been heard of by the greater 
part of his compatriots. I remember the com- 
ing in of Felix Faure. People had heard of a 
Sebastian Faure, an anarchist, and they said: 
''Who is this man Faure who has been made 
President? Is it the anarchist?" Then, once in 
office, the new President is nominally the head 
of the State, and yet he is not allowed to have 
a voice in anything that goes on. Even the 
few powers which the Constitution gives him, 
such as those of dissolving or suspending the 
two Chambers, he dares not exercise for fear 
of being suspected of meditating a coup d'etat. 
When he is elected he is generally a simple 
bourgeois, living in a plain, unostentatious 
fashion; and then the French love for tradi- 
tional pomp forces him from one day to an- 
other to exhibit himself as the central figure 
in a cortege of officers, to drive in a State car- 
riage with horses mounted by postilions, in a 
livery which makes an American think of a 
circus rider or a toreador, to give banquets to 
sovereigns, and to live in a palace. His rela- 
tions to the people, I should say, are about as 



i6o PARIS AS IT IS. 

close as those of the president of a railroad to 
his passengers; and yet their instincts demand 
that he shall in some way correspond to their 
notions of a king. So there is no greater anom- 
aly than the President; and his false position is 
always sure to be ridiculed by the changing, 
chafing Parisian populace. 

I am often asked if the man in office 
is popular. I should say no French Presi- 
dent was ever really popular. Whatever 
position he takes appears to be always 
exactly the contrary of what he should 
have done. Jules Grevy, for instance, was a 
politician and eloquent public speaker, whose 
remarkable good sense had a large share in the 
ruin of the Empire and the founding of the Re- 
public. But as he succeeded MacMahon, who 
fell because he showed he was in favor of a 
monarchial restoration, Grevy judged that his 
own role ought to be purely representative, 
with no influence whatever upon the course of 
affairs. So he organized his household on a 
scale of the most republican simplicity, like 
that of a simple citizen. This was precisely 
what was thrown in his face. He was called a 
concierge and a niggard, and was caricatured 
in shirt sleeves and a cotton nightcap. 

Sadi Carnot, to avoid Grevy's mistakes, 
went to the other extreme. He set up a train 
de maison which cost him each year nearly all 
his private income, and he multiplied his tours 



THE ELYSEE. i6i 

through the country, his receptions, his official 
\'isits. Then people began to reproach in him 
what they had clamored for inGrevy. His cari- 
catures represented him as an automaton with 
a dress suit glued to his body, lifting his hat 
and bowing at regular intervals like a me- 
chanical doll. 

Felix Faure's ease of manner, and the tact 
with which he received the Russian Emperor, 
the Parisians naturally pronounced the false 
elegance and pretentiousness of a parvenu. If 
he had lived a little longer I am not at all sure 
that they would not have accused this simple 
business man, who was once a tanner, of be- 
ing too much of an aristocrat. There has hard- 
ly been time to find in Emile Loubet exactly 
the opposite defects to those of his predeces- 
sors; but this will surely come. Has he not 
already been accused of lacking in decorum? 
He left a State procession to throw himself in 
the arms of his old mother at Montelimar. 

The fact is, that France has been too long 
ruled by kings and emperors to be able to 
comprehend as its head a man who is some- 
thing less than a king, and more than kind. 
He is a paradox, and there is a fitness in his 
living in a place Hke the Elysee, which in it- 
self is an anomaly as well. It is a little less 
than a palace, and more than an ordinary pri- 
vate hotel; and, oddly enough, almost ever 
since it was built it has been occupied only by 



1 62 PARIS AS IT IS. 

personages whose position in the State was 
undefined. For a long" time it was the home 
of Madame de Pompadour, a woman who was 
treated Hke a queen and feared Hke a Prime 
Minister, but who, after all, was nothing but 
an adventuress. Then, Josephine spent there 
the month before her divorce, when she was 
still an Empress in name and yet already de- 
throned. Murat, not born a king, but only a 
simple soldier of fortune, awaited there the 
precarious crown of Naples. Napoleon spent 
in it the three days after Waterloo, and signed 
there his second- abdication; and after him, 
strangely enough, came Wellington. The Due 
de Berry, that son of a king who was never to 
be a king, lived there up to his tragic death. 
From 1849 to 1852, Louis Bonaparte lived in 
this palace as *Trince President," and planned 
there the coup de force that was to make of 
him Napoleon III. And, finally, it was from 
theElysee that the beautiful Eugenie de Teba, 
the greatest adventuress of all to the French, 
went to that marriage which was to make of 
her the last sovereigness of France. 

The house is like its history. It is of all 
epochs and of all styles. Seen from the 
Faubourg St. Honore, its facade no doubt 
equals that of any of those fine old hotels built 
in the Eighteenth Century for princes or bank- 
ers, and called 'The Follies." It has the 
squareness of the time of Louis XIV., and 



THE ELYSEE. 163 

some of the elegance of that of Louis XV. It 
is a type of the transition from one to the 
other, and, even if we did not know the date 
when it was buih, we could divine it — 1718. 

But as you drive down the Faubourg St. 
Honore and recognize the home of the Presi- 
dent by the sentries in uniform on either side 
of the great stone gates, it is only necessary to 
cast one glance into the courtyard to find at 
once a shocking anachronism. This is the 
glass cage which surrounds the flight of steps 
leading up to the entrance, called by the Presi- 
dent's household the "monkey palace," be- 
cause it looks so much like the great monkey 
cage at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. This was 
the work of President Carnot. No glory of be- 
ing President of his country could ever quite 
equal, to Sadi Carnot, that which came to him 
when as a young man and an engineer he built 
an aqueduct that became celebrated in all 
Savoy. Of what profit was it to France to have 
an engineer at its head, if he did not build 
something? And Carnot constructed, too, a 
wonderful ballroom, made, like the Eif¥el 
tower, entirely of iron, which ran along the 
whole right wing of the house. The left wing 
was built by Louis Napoleon, and Grevy left 
his mark in a great salle looking out on the 
garden. Only one thing has been left un- 
touched through all these changes of a century 
and a half, and that is the charming little pavil- 



i64 PARIS AS IT IS. 

ion in the garden which was once the "silver 
boudoir" of Madame de Pompadour. From 
this to the "monkey palace" might be taken as 
an exact measure of the transformation which 
the years have wrought in the taste and ideas 
of the successive inhabitants of the Elysee. 

If the position of the President is a con- 
trast to ours, the inside life of the Elysee 
offers a still greater one. Our President may 
be ceremonious or not as he pleases. It de- 
pends only on his former training. But the 
President of France is like a hapless fly 
caught by chance in a great spider's web of 
traditional ceremonies. x'Ml his walk of life 
is regulated by a mysterious something called 
the Protocol, which takes outward form in as 
many as eight or ten people, under a chief, 
M. Crozier, whose only business is to see 
that he and everybody around him conduct 
themselves according to rule. Nobody 
knows exactly why this degree of ceremony 
is kept up, and still less would any one know 
how to do away with it. When the Presi- 
dent goes to a gala performance at the Opera, 
or at the Comedie Frangaise, the Director 
comes to meet him at the door with a torch- 
light in his hand, and escorts him to his box, 
exactly as in the days of royalty. This is writ- 
ten somewhere, in some old book of statutes, 
as one of the duties of a director of a state 
theatre. Who would have the authority to 



THE ELYSEE. 1G5 

say at any particular day of any particular 
year that this old custom should come to an 
end? The President never appears officially 
to any person, or in any place, without hav- 
ing the details regulated by some such tradi- 
tion which has passed into a rule. Even his 
unofficial acts do not appear to an American 
to be exactly characterized by simplicity. 
Take, for instance, President Faure's morning 
ride in the Bois, which he always took at 
eight o'clock in the morning. He was always 
attended by the member of his military house- 
hold specially charged with the superior di- 
rection of his cavalry and his hunting. The 
President and the officer left the Elysee to- 
gether, in the President's coupe, the ''piou- 
piou" on guard saluting as they got into the 
carriage. They drove to the Rond point dcs 
cavaliers in the Bois, where was found the 
famous piqueur Montjareret, with a groom 
holding the President's beautiful thorough- 
bred, and the director-general of the military 
cabinet, of the Elysee. With this cortege, 
the President started out for his ride, a Httle 
in advance of the others, the groom bringing 
up the rear on a thoroughbred which was a 
present from the Emperor of Morocco. Even 
if President Loubet goes for a little stroll on 
the boulevards, he is always followed by de- 
tectives in plain clothes. 

As French Presidents when they enter of- 



i66 PARIS AS IT IS. 

fice have always, like our own, reached an 
age when their habits are pretty well settled 
for life, they have never taken any more 
kindly than ours to this surveillance and to 
the pomp of courts, and consequently live 
lives whose two halves are paradoxes. Felix 
Faure built in the grounds of his villa at 
Havre a little summer-house where he could 
peacefully smoke his pipe, out of reach of 
the Protocol. He never occupied the state 
bedroom at the Elysee, but had fitted up for 
his own use a room with a little iron bed with 
white curtains, and simple furniture such as 
you may see exposed at the Bon-Marche. 
Neither did he write at the splendid Louis 
XIV. table, ornamented with exquisite 
brasses chiseled by Gouttiere, which is shown 
in the public office of the President. He 
worked in a private room arranged like a 
business man's office, with a plain counting- 
house desk. Carnot also fitted up for him- 
self a private suite of rooms, and Loubet is 
already following the example of his prede- 
cessors. 

None of the Presidents have left behind 
them in the Elysee the slightest trace of their 
individuality. Even the pictures that they 
have bought have not been chosen from any 
personal preference. No President has ever 
had any taste for art. Every one purchased 
so many pictures a year, but they were 



THE ELYSEE. 167 

always chosen by the secretaries or even 
by the architect of the palace. The only 
souvenir of a presidential occupant that I 
know of to be found in the Elysee is Grevy's 
pet duck, which still swims about in one of 
the basins of the garden, and answers to the 
name of "Baby," which Grevy gave it. Presi- 
dent Grevy was very fond of playing billiards, 
but there is nothing personal about his bil- 
liard-table, which is still there. It is exactly 
like any other billiard-table. 

For that matter the French President, also 
like our own, has very few moments for the 
indulgence of his personal tastes. The only 
time he has to himself is before nine o'clock 
in the morning. After that, the hour from 
nine to ten is devoted to the reading of his 
mail, which has been carefully sorted for him, 
and to the signing of documents. He does 
not make laws, but he makes decrees. He 
can decree, for instance, that the Exposition 
of 1900 shall open on the 15th of April. 
The rest of his time is given up to the Council 
meetings, the holding of audiences, the mak- 
ing of state visits, the giving of receptions, the 
visiting of hospitals, the opening of Salon or 
Exposition, the going in state to the races, or 
to some one of the thousand and one places 
which old monarchical traditions require the 
head of the State to solemnize with his pres- 
ence. The same sort of thing must be kept up 



1 68 PARIS AS IT IS. 

at night, for the ball of the Hotel de Ville 
cannot be opened without the President, nor 
the Cadet's ball, nor any similar function. 
Strange importance given to the representa- 
tive role of a man whose part with his minis- 
ters is no more than that of mediator or 
peacemaker! The President who did not play 
this to his satisfaction resigned — Casimir 
Perier. It goes without saying that this para- 
doxical ruler does not hold open receptions, 
like ours at the White House, where any 
citizen may walk in and shake hands with 
him. The Protocol decides who shall be re- 
ceived by him when he is at home, on two 
mornings of the week. This privilege is 
granted to the ordinary mortal only if he 
write, a few days beforehand, to the director 
of the "civil cabinet," or to the "General Sec- 
retary of the Presidency." 

In curious contrast to the fictitious splendor 
of the President's position is the utter efface- 
ment of the ladies of the Elysee. I went to 
Paris just at the time when Mrs. Cleveland's 
youth and loveliness were reigning in our re- 
publican court at home, and a large part of 
the daily press was filled with details about 
her personality. We knew just how many 
buttons she wore on her glove, and whether 
the baby had a silver or a coral rattle. In 
France it was hard to understand why more 
was not sai4 about Madame Carnot, and this 




Decoration over the Door of the Elysee. 




The President's Library at the Elysee. 



THE ELYSEE. 169 

silence seemed still more inexplicable in the 
case of the next President's young daughter. 
Mile. Lucie Faure. She had even written a 
little book, an account of a journey in Italy she 
made with her father, and nobody had ever 
heard of it. At home it would have been in 
every house in the land. Officially, the 
women of a President's family do not exist. 
For that matter, nearly everything pertaining 
to the status of woman in France still rests 
legally upon traditions which had their rise 
in the attitude of the little Corsican towards 
vv^omen. On that point he was mediaeval. 
Personally the feminine contingent of the 
Elysee must be rather glad that the Consti- 
tution does not recognize them, for it lets the 
chief lady of the Elysee keep up her ordinary 
habits of Hfe. She can have her ''day at 
home," and go out and come in like any of 
her friends. But as a wife with no official 
position, she can meet many of her hus- 
band's guests only through courtesy. This 
was especially noticeable when the Czar and 
Czarina visited Paris. In no way did the 
young Empress show more her exquisite tact 
than in her attitude towards the wives of pres- 
ent and past Presidents. She sent for Mme. 
and Mile. Lucie Faure to come and see her, 
and the first thing she did after leaving the 
train, on the very day of her arrival, was to 
go and makg a visit to the wif^ of Fr^inc^'w^ 



170 PARIS AS IT IS. 

murdered President, Madame Carnot. She 
had been at her grandmother's, Queen Vic- 
toria, she said, when the terrible news of the 
assassination was received in England, and 
should never forget the grief of the entire 
court; and she made up her mind then that 
if she ever went to Paris the first thing she 
should do would be to express her sympathy 
to Madame Carnot. This spontaneous bit of 
womanly feeling in a sovereign of the most 
ceremonious court in Europe, on an official 
visit, is, I think, a charming thing in history. 
I make it a rule to go to one ball at the 
Elysee in every administration. All these 
functions are exactly alike, except for the 
change in the chief figureheads, and they are 
as characteristically anomalous as everything 
about the palace. The Protocol makes them, 
in many respects, of remarkable spectacular 
splendor in their appointments, while these 
serve as a background for the most motley 
collection of people that could be gathered 
together under one roof. The ranks of 
motionless guards that line the steps as you 
enter, in their statuesque impressiveness, 
might be the famous Swiss of the Tuileries. 
The Protocol sees that you have sensation 
of a presentation of some sort as you enter 
the President's presence, announced by a 
magnificent functionary wearing a glittering 
chain. He shouts your name half across a 



THE ELYSEE. 171 

great empty room, in the centre of which 
stands the Chief Magistrate, wearing the broad 
red ribbon of Commander of the Legion of 
Honor, surrounded by the ghttering uniforms 
of his mihtary household, and the sparkling 
jewels and brilliant toilets of the ladies of the 
President's family and the wives of the min- 
isters. The President does not shake hands, 
nor do any of those receiving with him. 

The Protocol also makes the music and the 
flowers and the supper of due impressiveness, 
the official world is as splendid as at a court; 
and the rest is made up of the crushing, push- 
ing ten thousand who keep the governmental 
machine in motion. You see extraordinary 
types. The men are all in evening dress. "It 
were better to do without a bed in Paris 
than without 3 dress coat," Guy de Maupas- 
sant made one of his characters say. But all 
the women have not evening gowns. I shall 
never forget one who looked as though she 
had been upholstered for the occasion, in just 
such Utrecht velvet as was used formerly for 
furniture, while her ornaments were worsted 
tassels such as decorate chairs hanging from 
various parts of her person. But the crowd 
is not more incongruous than the palace itself, 
a background of pure style, strewn with a 
heterogeneous collection of bric-a-brac, relics 
of all the administrations. In a Httle salon, 
which was once Napoleon's sleeping-room, 



172 PARIS AS IT IS. 

there is a priceless tapestry, after cartoons by 
Raphael, representing the judgment of Paris, 
which once belonged to Madame de Main- 
tenon, and was cut up by her to have some 
clothing put on to the Three Beauties, which 
she considered too nude. But it looks down 
on a hearth-rug of modern BeauvaiS; where a 
monstrosity of a stuffed lion, by Gerome, re- 
poses in a bed of such flowers as grow on 
Berlin wool-work. 

Everywhere are the same anachronisms. A 
magnificent vase of old Sevres is side by side 
with one of those impossible alabaster clocks 
of the time of Louis Philippe, of which the 
French Garde-Meuble contains an inex- 
haustible supply for its State palaces and other 
buildings. There could be no greater con- 
trast than that between the old tapestried 
chairs in the private salon, once used famil- 
iarly by Marie Antoinette and Madame Ade- 
laide, and the simple bourgeois, plain meres 
de famille, who now use them; and from the 
precious carpets on the floors have been torn 
off successively the fleurs de lys and crowned 
N's, to put in their places emblems of the 
Republic. 



In the Ministries, 

The greatest goddess of France is her "Ad- 
ministration," a goddess whose temples are 
called "Grand Ministeres." I never look 
at one of these without a feeling of 
melancholy. They seem to me nothing 
more or less than terrible Molochs, into 
which are thrown every year hundreds of en- 
thusiastic boys just from college, to be given 
up only when all the energy and initiative and 
independence have been crushed out of them 
by years of monotonous routine, passed over 
eternal papers. The full meaning of the word 
Administration is something which only dawns 
upon you by degrees, if you live in France. 
You know that your postman belongs to it, 
and it seems natural. But little by little you 
discover that the Administration means not 
only the postman, but the policeman, and the 
sweeper of the streets, and the custom-house 
officer, and the china painter at Sevres, and 
the school teacher, and the trained nurse, and 
the tapestry maker of the GobeUns, and the 
cure, and the mayor, and the bishop, and the 
professor, and the judge; that each one of 
these is an integral part of a gigantic machine 

173 



174 PARIS AS IT IS. 

extending from one end of the country to the 
other, made up of hundreds of thousands of 
employes, whose sole centre and direction is 
in Paris. 

Generally you get this part of your educa- 
tion either by coming up against this in some 
way yourself, or by seeing some one else do 
it. My first experience of the kind I have 
never forgotten. It was in a hospital, where 
I had a friend invalided, but not laid low, and 
under a surgeon's care. The place was the 
single maison-de- smite y or private paying hos- 
pital, in Paris, which is under the State. The 
charges in it were something like twenty 
dollars a week, everything included. When 
my friend's breakfast came up in the morning 
there was no sugar for the cofifee, and she 
asked for some. **The Administration does 
not give sugar," was the reply. She asked 
for butter for her bread. *The Administra- 
tion does not give butter," was the same re- 
sponse. This regulation appeared to be 
purely arbitrary. The Administration gave 
certain unexpected things with lavishness; 
yet neither bribes, threats nor prayers could 
extract a bit of butter or a single lump of 
sugar from the institution during her entire 
stay. 

Since then, how many times have I picked 
up the Paris Herald to find from the 
various letters with which the ingenuous 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 175 

tourist instructs the public that in some way 
he has run up against this same vague but 
mighty force. It is generally through some 
such thing as a detail connected with the 
regulations at a railway station, or a per- 
formance at the Comedie Franqaise, or the 
sending of a post-office order, which he ap- 
parently seems to consider has been in- 
vented for his particular annoyance, to 
infringe on his rights as a free-born Ameri- 
can citizen. He has never seen anything of 
the kind, he says, in the glorious old town at 
home that he comes from, and wonders what 
they would think of it there, and he usually 
ends by giving the French some advice on the 
simplifying of their arrangements in general, 
in the apparently trusting faith that a sug- 
gestion from some advanced person is all 
that is needed to make a change. Little does 
he realize that every one of these petty de- 
tails is as much a part of the general structure 
of things as the institution of the President of 
the Republic, and that you might almost as 
well try to change the movements of a planet 
in its orbit as the least of these. Every- 
thing in France is regulated by this colossal 
organization, which looks with the same be- 
nevolent interest not only after such great 
things as the maintenance and execution of 
the old laws, and the new ones passed by the 
Chamber, and the measures ordered by the 



176 PARIS AS IT IS. 

President, and the decrees of the Ministers, 
and the organizing of the army, but such de- 
tails as the kind of material that shall be put 
on a match head — which explains why French 
matches never strike — or whether a mor- 
sel of sugar shall be comprised in the re- 
past of a patient in a hospital. You come 
to feel, in time, as though it were part of the 
integral structure of things; as inseparably 
France as her network of rivers. 

All over the country the workings of this 
machine are precisely the same. With us, 
each State is attached to the soil by its own 
fibres. It is represented at Washington, but 
it can live independently. In France every- 
thing is regulated from Paris, and the entire 
people uphold the Administration, because 
every one, either in himself or through his 
son, or his brother, or his friend, represents 
some little integral part of it. The longer 
you live there the more you realize that the 
French do not want to change the machine. 
They are willing to have it put in repair every 
twenty or thirty years, and to introduce, per- 
haps, a few modern improvements, but they 
could not actually conceive of any other way 
of doing things. If you trepanned the 
nation, I am quite sure you would find in 
the construction of their brains little coils 
of ideas somewhere spelling out the adminis- 
trative language. However ironically the 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 177 

Frenchman may utter the proverbial phrase, 
*'Our Administration which is the envy of 
Europe," you may be very sure that in his 
heart he admires it religiously and respects it 
profoundly. 

Why has it stayed when so much has gone? 
I used often to wonder. There are excellent 
psychological reasons for its survival. It is 
stable, unchanging; everything that the 
French are not; as admirably adapted to their 
needs as the honey-comb to the bees. But 
I am quite sure its real hold comes from emi- 
nently practical reasons, and three of these in 
particular. The first is the special kind of com- 
pulsory education which has been enforced dur- 
ing the last twenty-five years. It has produced 
an entire generation of young men to whom a 
semi-classical education has given a distaste 
for trade or any sort of business; the second 
is the establishment of universal suffrage and the 
spoils system, so that every Senator and every 
Deputy needs a bone of some sort to throw 
to his constituents, and would have to in- 
vent places if they did not already exist; and 
the last is the national character of the peo- 
ple and their intense love for staying quietly 
at home. They must ensure to themselves 
some existence which will let them stay com- 
fortably in France to the end of their days. 

It is hard for us to realize how difficult 
it is to be able to look forward to an assured 



178 PARIS AS IT IS. 

existence in this old world, where every place 
is always already occupied. Go to the Halles, 
the great central market, some morning be- 
fore the dew is yet off the fruits and vege- 
tables, and as you watch the workings of the 
enormous machine by which Paris is pro- 
visioned, think that the right to sell green 
groceries there descends in fief from gene- 
ration to generation, and that the men who 
auction these off to the dealers and the hotels 
all over the city stand on the very spot on 
a certain pavement where the buyers who 
preceded them have stood in direct line for 
over two hundred years! How many people 
are looking on and watching for the moment 
when anyone shall drop out! I am sure that 
this thought of dropping out at home is one 
explanation of why the French are no greater 
colonizers; this and their national character, 
again. Much observation, not only of their 
characteristics, but of the English, has led 
me to deduct another reason for the French 
lack of enterprise in colonizingfromtheattitude 
of both towards the foreigner. Everything 
French is always the best thing to every 
Frenchman, as everything English is to the 
Englishman. The difference between the 
two, however, is that to differ from an Eng- 
lishman is to be in the wrong. Then, with his 
belief in his mission for imposing his point of 
view on the world, it becomes his moral duty 




Under the Eiffel Tower. 




Place du Chatelet, Victory Fountain. 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 179 

to put you right. But to differ from a 
Frenchman is only to be stupid, and the best 
thing to do with stupid people is to leave 
them alone. When a country is neither 
French nor likely ever to become French, 
what is the use of wasting time trying to 
colonize it? It is much better to stay at home. 

It is easy to see why it would hardly be con- 
sidered respectable for a man to stay at home 
without an assured place in a highly organized 
society like the French; and therefore it be- 
comes quite as much a matter of concern for 
parents to establish their sons as it is to marry 
their daughters. 

''What are you going to be when you are 
a man?" I once asked the charming little son 
of one of my French friends. 

He thought for a moment. "I am going to 
be either a coachman or a bishop or a wash- 
woman," he answered, finally. 

This incongruous selection of occupations 
was natural in a French baby. He wanted 
to be a coachman because he loved horses, a 
bishop because of the splendor of the vest- 
ments he saw in church, and a washwoman 
because the happy blanchisseuses knelt by the 
river banks and dabbled all day long in the 
water, which he was forbidden by his mother 
to touch. 

But at ten you will find this love for horses, 
water and finery transformed in the aver- 



i8o PARIS AS, IT IS. 

age French boy to a burning desire to 
be either a soldier or a sailor. Either one of 
these is the vocation of almost all boys of 
that age. It is then that his mother begins 
now and then to wear a frown as she sits over 
her work, and the father to shake his head. 
Naturally they do not want to thwart the im- 
perious genius of their son — who of course 
has genius; but soldiers are exposed to many 
dangers, such as battles, and sailors must 
live far from home and are at the mercy of the 
wave. That means a checkered existence for 
the boy, and much anxiety for his parents at 
the end of their days. They do not say much, 
but they lead him on to push as far as possible 
his studies; to take a bachelor's degree, and 
very likely to read for the bar, and pass his 
examinations. Meanwhile he has enough 
leisure to see a little of student life, with 
an illusion of independence. 

Then, as simple soldier, he does one year 
of military service, which is quite enough to 
disgust him with the profession of arms for 
the rest of his days. Finally, at twenty-one 
or twenty-two, he finds himself face to face 
with the necessity of deciding on an occupa- 
tion — and his father! The father wears his 
most serious air; he reads his son a lecture 
on the future; and he ends by alluding to his 
friend the Deputy so-and-so, who has great 
influence with one of the ministers, or to s^n- 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 



I8l 



other who is a gros-bonnet of the Adminis- 
tration. A few good introductions, an easy 
examination, and in only a short time the 
youth may be settled for life. The boy has no 
experience of the world except of existence 
at home. How can he be expected to have 
personal initiative and independence when 
they are something that he has neither in- 
herited nor that have ever been taught him? 
He knows nothing about money except the 
financial problems which have been offered 
by his modest allowance, and the slender sal- 
ary in question seems enormous compared 
to any sum he has ever had the handling of 
before. Perhaps, more than anything else, he 
is tempted, too, by the idea of having a de- 
fined position, and the end is that a few 
months later he is one more recruit grafted 
into the immense army of functionaries. The 
minds of his parents are at rest, for the bread 
of their boy is assured. 

The boy takes his seat at his desk, and in the 
beginning has all the enthusiasm of his years. 
He gets together his materials to l)uild a 
bridge to the moon no less than the youth of 
that other Republic of whom Thoreau wrote 
the words; and then added that as middle- 
ages man, they generally concluded to build a 
woodshed with those materials. All young men, 
when they first go into a Ministry, expect to 
be journalists outside of office hours; to make 



i82 PARIS AS IT IS. 

plays; to write great novels, like Guy de Mau- 
passant, who was also a functionary, or to be 
remarkable painters, like Rene Billotte, who 
was another. 

Then, gradually the greater part of them al- 
low themselves little by little to become hyp- 
notized by the regular movement of the ma- 
chine. They fall more and more into a monot- 
onous routine, broken only by their marriage 
possibly with a daughter of their chef, and 
certainly with some one with that dot which, 
on general principles, a woman quite right- 
ly to my mind in the Old World brings 
to marriage in order to take her share 
in the expenses of the common existence. 
If they achieve their highest ambitions 
they get to be chefs themselves; and final- 
ly, at sixty they look for the last time into the 
tiny mirrors of their offices, see that their hair 
is gray, and that they have grown old without 
knowing where the years ha-(^e gone to; and 
then they go ofT into some little corner with 
their pensions of four or five thousand francs 
a year — to die soon after from having made a 
change of ennuis! 

The very thought of the machine hypnotizes 
me as I write and frame the monotonous sen- 
tences describing it coming from the monot- 
onous little corners of my brain in which its 
details are stored. If so much generalization 
seems to make an exaggerated picture, re- 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 183 

member that the functionaries in the Cham- 
ber of Deputies outnumber all the business 
men and agriculturists and manufacturers 
put together, and that some one has latel}^ pub- 
lished a statement, with statistics to prove it, 
that there is one functionary in France to every 
ten inhabitants. From this he draws the con- 
clusion that the dawn of the Twenty-first Cen- 
tury will see nothing but a nation of employes. 
This is the fantastic menace of the statistic 
fiend; but it also contains in it the warning 
voice of the Cassandra. 

The French know perfectly well themselves 
the elements of decadence which lie in this or- 
ganization. They accepted vigorous arraign- 
ment of it in Demolins's ''Anglo-Saxon Superi- 
ority" with that calm with which we say the 
worstpossible things about ourselves, and then, 
with the exception, perhaps, of Jules Lemaitre, 
everybody promptly forgot the book. But not 
knowing too well how to do without the ma- 
chine, they compromise on a general cry 
against the present system of education, which 
makes all the boys ready to go into it. A 
French school-boy is to me the most dispirit- 
ing thing in the country. "Oh, base-ball, foot- 
ball, golf, boating, Junior Proms, cotillons, or 
any other words bringing with them a whifY of 
the strong, breezy, bracing air of an American 
college, to thee I sing!" I always feel hke say- 
ing as I look upon him. The Lycees and col- 



i84 PARIS AS IT IS. 

leges are doing something for him with a 
movement towards athletics; but what a mel- 
ancholy sight he is in the private schools, when 
he takes his sad promenade through the Paris 
streets with his companions, marshaled two by 
two like a girl's boarding school, under the 
charge of a ''pion" such as Alphonse Daudet 
once was, or a priest. 

The boys under the last are the ''good Re- 
publicans brought up by the Jesuit fathers" to 
whom Abel Hermant alluded in his play; and 
they are one of the elements for keeping alive 
the possibility of some great future tragedy 
like the "afTaire." Most of them will probably 
go into the army, the great resource for the 
sons of the nobility; and their education is 
keeping alive traditions directly opposed to the 
spirit of free institutions, and the Republic. 
As surely as the world moves, some day some 
great crash between all these opposing ele- 
ments that can instantly be taken up by all the 
politicians on both sides, will again be in- 
evitable. The best educated of the young men. 
who should be the greatest influences to- 
wards an intelligent public opinion, will not 
be in the active arena. They will be in the 
Government, which means outside of things. 
The best of our college graduates are not in 
politics at home, it is true. But at home we 
have an intelligent public opinion. The French 
have not. 




Mrst Communicants. 




Coming Out from Mass at St. Gernaain des Pres, 



IN THE MINISTRIES. 185 

There is nothing to make a visit to the tem- 
ples of the great governmental Moloch, into 
which go so much youth, especially interesting. 
They are all alike; great gray stone structures, 
with sombre, echoing courts, as impersonal and 
immutable in appearance as though Finance, 
Agriculture, and the others in proportion as 
they had grown, had projected for themselves 
visible shells. Within are labyrinths of bare 
white corridors, relieved only by gray arrows 
pointing to inscriptions such as "Direction 
Generale," "Bureau des Ordonnancements," 
with here and there an occasional upholstered 
door, indicating the office of a ''grand chef." 
Beware how you speak to the gardens or office 
boys you meet in these long corridors! They 
will only answer your questions if you address 
them in terms of the most exquisite politeness. 
They are there for life. They are functionaries 
as much as the Minister himself, and have this 
advantage over him that they stay on when the 
Government falls, while he goes. The con- 
cierge at the door has also a life position, as 
you can tell by the calm air of superiority with 
which, as you pass, he goes on reading his eter- 
nal newspaper in his little lodge, tapestried 
with keys, without so much as honoring you 
with a glance. 

A friend one day ofifered to take us to the Min- 
istry of Public Instruction, where he knew some 
one in the very office in which once worked 



iS6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the man who has made the greatest name 
of all the functionaries, Guy de Maupassant. 
The idea of seeing the very desk on which was 
drafted "Boule de Suif," and the room from 
which came the materials for "V Heritage,'' 
tempted us like a pilgrimage, and we went. 

The old office of the great writer was a little 
place, measuring perhaps twelve feet in each 
direction, whose walls were entirely covered 
with green paste-board boxes with white la- 
bels which stared at you like blinking eyes. It 
had a single window looking out over the 
roofs. By leaning over you could just catch 
sight of the flight of stone steps leading up to 
the hotel of the Minister, and of the cockade 
of his coachman; a celebrated coachman, who 
had driven every head of that department for 
twenty-five years. 

There were three inhabitants in the room; 
a pale young man finishing with feverish haste 
the copying of a letter of seventeen pages ex- 
plaining to a country school teacher, with many 
quotations from ministerial circulars, that he 
had made a mistake of twelve centimes in his 
accounts; a thin and melancholy ancient "sous- 
off," whose functions were to classify corre- 
spondence, but who at that moment was en- 
gaged in the classifying of a collection of post- 
age stamps on his own account; and, finally, a 
jovial personage, who we were told was a lit- 
tle "touched" and was only kept through char- 



7.V THE MINISTRIES. 187 

ity. This was the single thing which could 
evoke the souvenir of poor de Maupassant, 
and the little cage was interesting only as an 
exact model of all the other little cages in 
which hundreds of thousands of functionaries 
at that moment were doing the same copying, 
transcribing and classifying. 

Other celebrities than Guy de Maupassant 
have gone out from them, however. Among 
these are Andre Theuriet, the novelist, and 
Courteline, the writer, and Armand Sylvestre, 
and the painter Rene Billotte, of whom I have 
already spoken. Huysmans, the author of 
"En Route," another celebrated functionary, 
upon his retirement with a pension went 
to live under the shadow of the old con- 
vent of Ligurge, and has just become 
a priest. He has not lost for this a 
Frenchman's esprit. Lately he wrote to a 
friend upon a sheet of paper bearing the letter- 
head of his old office: "Ministere de Vln- 
terieur,'' which he had quaintly changed into 
''Ministre dc la Vie Inter ieiire'' 

To think of the years in which such hands as 
that were occupied in writing only the endless 
trivialities of administrative detail! I once 
saw an illustration of the kind of thing 
on which the Ministry of the Interior 
busies itself. In a little corner of France 
some cherry trees planted on the public 
highway bore fruit, which no one gathered. 



i88 PARIS AS IT IS. 

An inhabitant of that part of the country wrote 
to Paris and offered to buy the cherries of the 
State. He made his demand in March, so as 
to have plenty of time to get the answer before 
the fruit season. It came at the end of No- 
vember. What care the State takes of her 
roads, however; how endlessly she looks after 
the general well-being in thousands of ways! 
You feel sometimes as though existence for 
the French were one great personally-con- 
ducted tour, where everything was so arranged 
and planned out for them that they had no re- 
sponsibility, and were free to enjoy the scenery 
as they went along. This great organization, 
whose roots are so deeply intertwined in the 
sub-soil of national life, keeps the country 
steady at bottom, no matter what agitations 
shake her surface. And its iniquitous pres- 
ence makes "France" a very real and palpable 
thing to her people. I can quite believe the 
story of the peasant who was found at the door 
of the Chamber asking to be taken to "The 
State." He had a goose in the basket on his 
arm, he said, which he had brought as a pres- 
ent for him. 



PART III. 

THE ART LIFE AND ITS 
INSTITUTIONS. 



The Mttseum of Cluny. 

I never see the Museum of Cluny without 
wondering why someone with money and 
taste does not copy it, stone by stone, to make 
for himself a princely dwelling. I know of 
no more beautiful house than this, in which 
Gothic architecture, flowered here and there 
with Italian Renaissance, blossoms upon the 
ruins of the old Roman palace of JuHan the 
Apostate. 

Cluny was the first bachelor apartment 
house that was ever made, I fancy. Bachelor- 
hood was no temporary estate with the abbes 
of Cluny, for whom it was built. They were 
younger sons, who came mto the church irre- 
vocably with their coming into the world, and 
into an abbey before they arrived at the age of 
reason. Theypractised a healthy sort of Chris- 
tianity which kept their souls well alive, and 
appreciated a pied a terre in Paris. This was 
in 1490, just two years before Columbus real- 
ized his idea of providing on a colossal scale 
footholds for the world's superfluous sons, 
without distinction of age. These cadets of 
the house of Bourdon and Ambroise were 
grand seigneurs, intimate friends and kins- 

191 



192 PARIS AS IT IS. 

men of kings, and a jolly lot, who felt no re- 
morse at leaving the details of their profession 
to their monks, while they donned cuirasses 
under their long robes, cavalcaded, and 
played the gallant at the levee of the king, 
their relative. 

We have to keep well in mind these man- 
ners of the day to thoroughly understand the 
charm of this old palace, which comes not 
only from the exquisite harmony of its pro- 
portions, but also from the unexpectedness, 
the contradictoriness in its ornamentation, the 
very emblem of the time in which it was built. 
A cathedral is frozen music, Coleridge said. 
Mr. Tom Appleton called the Boston Art 
Museum frozen Yankee Doodle. Cluny 
might be called frozen fifteenth century. It 
is at any rate an exact symbol of that epoch 
which saw everywhere such a strange min- 
gling of contradictions; the century in which 
France was led, and, what is more curious 
still, without seeming in the least to wonder 
at it, by two women of exactly opposite 
types, the one, Agnes Sorel, the most coquet- 
tish, frivolous and beautiful of her sex, the 
other, the purest incarnation of religious faith 
and patriotism the world has seen, Jeanne 
d'Arc. 

You have only to look at its details to see 
this; windows filled with tracery as delicately 
wrought as lace looking down on a crenelated 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. 193 

wall, such as you would find in a moated 
chateau; a Cupid jocularly striding a dolphin 
side by side with the cockleshells of St. 
Jacques and a cardinal's hat; a gargoyle gro- 
tesquely twisting its ape-like head which has 
for pendant a seraphim, full of candid grace. 
Even the old device that for five hundred 
years has been graven in the court is am- 
biguous: ''Servare Deo regnare est," **To 
serve God is to reign," in one reading, "To 
reign is to serve God," in the other. Every- 
where you come on the unexpected; and this 
naive mingling of profane and religious does 
not shock, because the whole combines to give 
a perfect impression of art, and has the har- 
mony of all really beautiful and artistic 
things. 

Nevertheless this mediaeval Gotliic style, in 
the moments when I do not take it for 
granted, sets me perpetually wondering how 
mankind was ever inspired to create such a 
thing. It is taken directly from nature, while 
in our day architecture is the art which of all 
arts gets the least from nature. This, too, 
in a time when painters, sculptors, musicians 
and writers have more deHberately broken 
with traditions and gone to nature for their 
inspiration than ever before. In the Middle 
Ages, however, the architect as well as the 
painter had his sketch-book and noted in it 
religiously anything that appealed to him in 



194 PARIS AS IT IS. 

natural harmonies, the curves in the Hnes of a 
mountain, the bend of a plant arrested in its 
growth by a rock, the supple movements of a 
fawn, the inspiration given by a forest in the 
pale light of the moon. Then, instinctively, 
no doubt, but at all events, justly, for the sim- 
ple reason that he was sincere, he formed 
from these a decorative system, based on the 
principles of nature's designs. He himself, 
too, was a master builder, and his workmen 
put as much freedom and devotion into a 
single capital as the designer of the building 
into its whole. 

To feel all this we have only to enter the lit- 
tle chapel of Cluny on the second floor. How 
did any architect ever solve such an extra- 
ordinary problem as that of giving to this tiny 
room, which measures scarcely more than 
eight yards in each direction, the grandeur of 
a cathedral nave? To try to analyze the 
means by which such an impression is pro- 
duced would be like trying to analyze genius 
itself. Is it from this niche forming an altar 
projecting from the wall like the prow of a 
ship, and delicately illuminated with a mys- 
terious light by the jeweled panes set in the 
tiny windows in the form of hands in prayer? 
Or is it from the single pillar in the centre, 
springing with the delicate grace of a foun- 
tain to expand in laces and interlaces upon the 
vault overhead? It is certainly from both 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. 195 

of these, and a hundred other details besides, 
trifling in themselves, but which, growing one 
out of the other, and all together into one, 
each exactly in the place to which it belongs, 
become transcended as a whole into some- 
thing grand and imposing, with the very- 
majesty of nature itself. 

It only needs this one chapel, or Cluny as 
a whole, to learn the secret of Gothic architec- 
ture, and, indeed, of all the styles that suc- 
ceeded it. Style was something free and nat- 
ural in those days. It was determined by 
the character and expression to be given to 
the ensemble of a structure, and so it was 
that a man could build a house and a church 
with the same style, and have the one look 
like a house, and the other like a church; 
whereas in our time religious feeling must 
invariably be incarnated in something Gothic 
or Byzantine, while splendor in the way of a 
dwelling means to us a copy of one of the 
chateaux of Touraine, or the Trianon of Ver- 
sailles, set down in one of our modern 
streets. The architect is no longer free. Y9U 
would almost say that his art was a sort of 
patented thing in which the principal requisite 
was to have the right brand; that carrying 
everything before it in the market at present 
being the one stamped ''ficole des Beaux 
Arts." 

Since we are given to copying, however, 



196 PARIS AS IT IS. 

why not transplant Cluny? During its five 
hundred years of existence it seems to have 
been considered a fitting home for all sorts 
and conditions of people. Soon after it was 
finished, the abbes put it at the disposition of 
the kings of France, who lodged in it many 
distinguished guests: Mary of England, 
widow of Louis XII.; James the Fifth of 
Scotland, many Papal nuncios, an Abbess 
of Port Royal, and finally, at the end of the 
eighteenth century, the celebrated astrono- 
mers, Lalande and Messier. With the Revo- 
lution, like all the property of the State, it 
became national, and it afterward passed 
through different hands until, in 1843, i^ was 
sold to the State by M. du Sommerard, with 
the rare collection of bibelots and works of 
art which he had collected in it, and it became 
a Museum. 

It is to me the most sympathetic and human 
of all the museums — this old hotel, left to us, 
as Victor Hugo said, ''for the consolation of 
the artist." As a whole, it is the most perfect 
bibelot in existence. I love it in its interior 
and exterior, and everything that belongs to 
them both, in all their satisfying harmony; 
one of the most perfect expressions of beauty, 
and certainly of the lives of men and women 
of the past which the world has to offer us. 
As you w^ander through it you seem to be 
admitted to the very intimacy of a Due de 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. 197 

Guise, or of one of those Queens who trailed 
through the rooms the white weeds that they 
wore as mourning for their royal husbands. 
In that room called "la chambre de la Reign 
Blanche" here is the bed, all dressed, with its 
coverlid embroidered with flowers and ara- 
besques; the books of hours are still open at 
their illuminated pages, near a covered chair 
with arms wide spread, in order to lodge the 
heavy robes of brocade; upon the wrought 
andirons in the gigantic fireplace lie the great 
logs of other days ; in the twilight in the back- 
ground glimmer the panels of the bahuts of 
pear-tree or of thuya, where Hercules and 
Theseus in relief combat with complicated 
chimeras; through the open doors comes a re- 
flection from the high polish of an armoire, 
or of a rare faience. Just so it must have 
been in the time of a Francois ler or a Henri 
IV. And the idea of this arrangement is 
not simply to make an amusing historical re- 
production. It is to give to each object its 
true value, to bring out its real significance 
in form and color, so that even the most mod- 
est bibelot becomes an illustration of the law 
in art that a tone has value only through 
others that are beside it. A red near a yellow- 
is quite a different thing from a red near a 
gold tone like a blue or green; and the same 
rule holds good in form. Look at the Salle 
des Faiences, and I am sure you will find, as 



198 PARIS AS IT IS. 

I do, something positively exhilarating in the 
effects in these rare porcelains. A pure, cold 
blue in a bit of Spanish faience has next it a 
pale yellow, a deep blue a deep yellow; and 
notice this grotesque black china creature in 
the line above which so accents the whole! As 
your eye glances along the quiet richness of 
the Palissy potteries at the end of the room, 
and the fifteenth and sixteenth century gres, 
to fall suddenly upon the bright, living green 
of the bits of Chelsea ware in the vitrine next 
the balustrade, the whole place, at that instant, 
seems to exist only to make you feel it prop- 
erly. 

I love the sudden sensation of inspiration 
that comes as you go from the room filled 
with the Luca della Robbias into the one 
beyond in which is the old glass; all one side 
of it filled with tiny diamond panes, against 
which sky and leaves outside are in a net, 
while from stained medallions set in here and 
there the light apparently falls through green 
emeralds, or blue lapis lazuli, and sapphires 
upon the slender-stemmed, iridescent things 
in the vitrines. Where you may steep your 
soul in color, however, is in the room at the 
end of the second floor, hung with those 
Flemish tapestries of the time of Louis XIL, 
in which mysterious ladies attended by 
languishing courtiers pursue their tranquil 
occupations in a delicious landscape of dull 




Room of Francis I., Cluny Museum. 




The Garden of Cluny. 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. i()C) 

golds and faded reds and greens and pome- 
granates to make a background for the 
strangely magnificent objects which are every- 
where in the place. A mass of dull splendor 
is the Flemish altar-piece of gold, wrought 
into the figures of the Saviour and saints, and 
two little kings kneeling at their feet, which 
was given in 1079 ^^ ^^^^ Cathedral of Basle. 
And in the gold crowns of the old Gothic 
king Recesventhus, how the delicacy of their 
lovely filagree work, hung with cabochon 
amethysts and aquamarines, is intensified by 
contrast with the massive bands for encir- 
cling those mighty Gothic heads! The whole 
gains so in value, too, by being placed ex- 
actly in the spot in the room where it belongs, 
opposite the window, so that the light, again 
tinted by jeweled medallions, streams through 
the gold and the precious stones. The minia- 
ture gold boat of the Emperor Charles V. in 
the corner must have once been used as a 
centrepiece for his table, according to the 
fashion of his time. Paul Veronese, I remem- 
ber, puts such a boat into the ''Marriage of 
Cana" at the Louvre. Orchardson had one 
a few years ago in his Salon picture, "The 
Little Duke." And the chess-board in gold 
and rock crystal, called that of St. Louis, has 
served as pastime to many kings. 

It would be a mistake, however, to think 
that the greater part of the 18,000 bibelots 



200 PARIS AS IT IS. 

which make up the collection of Cluny were 
either royal or princely objects. Though you 
can scarcely find one that is not a specimen of 
the most delicate art, they belong almost en- 
tirely to everyday life and the life of private 
individuals. I remember the French work- 
man Bazin that Robert Louis Stevenson 
quotes in his "Inland Voyage/' with whom he 
recommends a talk as an antidote to the visit 
of Zola's marriage party to the Louvre. He 
had delighted in the museums in his youth. 
''One sees there such Httle miracles of work," 
he said. "That is what makes the good work- 
man. It kindles a spark." And it seems to 
be a fact that up to the time of the nineteenth 
century in France, and indeed in almost all 
civilized countries, the simplest workman had 
an innate sense of elegance of form, and 
beauty of detail, and even the most common- 
place buyer had it like him. From the 
fifteenth century to the time of the Revolu- 
tion, though there was sometimes a fancy for 
the horrible, as in the monsters of the 
churches, absolutely nothing was made in 
France that was ugly, even for the most 
commonplace uses. This we can see from 
Cluny, which contains the most perfect col- 
lection in existence of everyday things. Look 
at the charming series of locks and keys, of 
window fastenings and knockers for doors on 
the second floor, so beautifully wrought that 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. 201 

even iron has delicacy. They were simply 
picked up at random all over France. Some 
were found in the fields, and others in the bed 
of the Seine, and they came from the ordinary 
houses of the people. I can remember seeing 
myself a beautiful lock some years ago, on 
the door of a simple peasant's cottage of the 
fifteenth century, in the little village of Tallois, 
in Savoy. Is it not delightful to think of a 
time when art was so popularized? To con- 
vince yourself of this still further, notice these 
old keys of the sixteenth century, ending in 
an arched capital wrought in openwork, and 
surmounted with chimerical figures; or, bet- 
ter yet, the lock of this old German bahut of 
the fifteenth century, on which are repre- 
sented St. John, St. James, and St. Barbara, 
and all of whose nails as well as its keyhole 
are masked with winged cherubim. 

A little farther on the specimens of faience 
in the room of the porcelains are only the 
basins, the plates, the sugar bowls, the veg- 
etable dishes of everyday use, but there is not 
a single one of them, whether it comes from 
Moustiers, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Rouen, 
Nevers, Delft, or Raeren, which is not beau- 
tiful in form, and pleasant to the eye through 
the harmonious arabesques that decorate it, 
or the ornaments of fruit or animal that form 
fresh and charming reHefs in the shining- 
enamel of the porcelain. In the vitrine of 



202 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Palissy potteries notice particularly the figure 
of a young nurse and child. How simple and 
natural it is, what a real little work of art, and 
yet we know beyond a doubt through an old 
book, the memoirs of one of the physicians of 
Louis XIII. , that it was originally nothing 
but a doll for the little king which cost only a 
few sous. I could go on multiplying ex- 
amples of this sort, in armoires, chairs, tables, 
arms, stuffs, but will only point out one more. 
In the last room of the second floor — the 
gold room — in two vitrines full of some of 
the latest acquisitions to the Museum, is a 
whole collection of feminine trinkets and toi- 
let articles. Each one seems to have an indi- 
vidual elegance and beauty, and to be inter- 
esting from an artistic point of view, which 
seems to be quite a different standpoint from 
that which so often apparently governs our 
dressing-tables nowadays. You would say 
this was that if one woman had sixty pieces 
of silver, another must have sixty-five. 

"How can all these little marvels in every- 
day things be explained?" I often ask myself 
as I wander through Cluny. The feverish life 
of to-day, in which labor is so dear, and 
machinery has so largely replaced handwork, 
has naturally led us to be above everything 
else practical, and to want things that are use- 
ful and cheap. But that would not account 



THE MUSEUM OF CLUNY. 203 

for the great taste that in other days pervaded 
all classes. 

As I beHeve that all art is the direct result 
of some high intellectual and spiritual im- 
pulse, this general artistic standpoint must 
have come in the beginning, I think, from the 
inspiration given by the crusades. The wave 
of reHgious feeling which swept with them 
over Europe produced great artists and arch- 
itects and churches; and the people, frequent- 
ing the churches, their susceptibiHties quick- 
ened by this feeling, were educated into a uni- 
versal love for beauty and consequently for 
art. This survived till the Revolution came, 
with its leveling tendencies, and the present 
century has gone on finishing its work. 

This is why Cluny remains to the world 
a delight, even though it contains no chef 
d'oeuvres, like the ^'Pilgrims of Emmaus," the 
"Winged Victory," or the Venus of the 
Louvre. I always feel as though I had dis- 
covered it, and must make it known to 
others; and when I see the tourist taking it 
sadly, as he generally does his museums, it 
is with difficulty I resist the impulse to rush 
up and try to make it known to him. 

I should at least like to say to the men 
wandering about with Baedekers or with 
guides: "Look at the guardian's hats! They 
are one of the few things instituted by the 
great Napoleon that you will see in Paris now. 



204 PARIS AS IT IS. 

They were the RepubHcan transformation 
under the Directoire of the old seigneurial 
hunting hat of the time of Louis XVI. The 
incroyables wore them, and Napoleon put them 
into the army. Now they are worn in France 
only by those guardians, the gendarmes, the 
generals, and the pupils of the ficole Poly- 
technique." 



The Little Mttseums, 

Paris is a city of museums. You find them 
everywhere, of all kinds, for every sort of 
study. The great Museum of the Louvre, it- 
self, is only a suite of museums, a collection of 
collections; each so valuable that a single one 
would make the glory of a great capital. From 
age to age have been gathered into it the 
flower of the artistic and archaeological riches 
which France has been heaping up for so many 
generations. The national palaces, the 
churches and the private houses were so 
gorged with beautiful things in the centuries 
of splendor, that in spite of revolutions, and 
the ruin of old families, and the destruction of 
old things when new fashions came in, a great 
hoard of treasures has been handed down to 
the present day, and with the RepubHc has be- 
come the property of the State, which means 
that of everybody. Everybody is richer than 
anybody, the saying is; and nowhere is this 
truer than in Paris. 

His capital, too, is always increasing. This 
is not only through the appropriations which 
his business manager, the State, makes every 
year, but through constant gifts and legacies. 

205 



2o6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

These are the resuh of patriotic generosity, or 
the wish for posthumous fame, of above all 
the longing in the donor to preserve works of 
art which have often been family souvenirs 
that he has loved all his life. All roads in 
France lead to Paris, the great absorber of 
the artistic and intellectual force of the entire 
country; and no one museum would ever 
have been large enough to hold the steady 
flow of treasures and historical relics which 
have poured into the capital for ages past. 
So all over the city have sprung up the de- 
lightful places called "les petits musees." 

You may live in Paris for years without 
particularly noticing many of these. The 
Musee Guimet, the Musee des Religions, 
for instance, on the Place dTena, is one 
of my neighbors, and it almost goes with- 
out saying that I passed it constantly for 
two years without ever thinking of go- 
ing in. Then, one day some one sent me an 
invitation to a Buddhist service to be held 
there by a Grand Lama from Thibet; one of 
those real Grand Lamas from that old convent 
of Lhassa, which the outsider never ap- 
proaches without meeting instant death. The 
Trans-Caspian railway had sent him to Russia, 
and, hearing that there was a Musee des Re- 
ligions in Paris, he supposed it a temple of his 
cult, and the laws of his religion obliged him 
to come and hold a service there. It was one 



THE LITTLE MUSEUMS. 207 

of those exotic sights that you get nowhere but 
in a great capital and made a deep impression 
on me through its contrasts; on one side all of 
the Parisian world that the little amphithe- 
atre could hold; the diplomats and savants, 
and other men of mark, and beautiful and dis- 
tinguished women; and on the other the 
strange figure of the priest, standing before an 
altar symbolizing the mystic number seven, 
making his genuflexions and manipulating 
his gleaming scarf of orange-red silk with 
an expression of almost sublime abstraction 
on his face. 

I wondered how such a temple came to be 
there, and, on inquiring afterward, found that 
the entire museum was nothing but the collec- 
tion of a M. Guimet, of Lyons. He made a 
fortune in selling dyes of his own invention, 
and used his leisure to collect precious things 
connected with the history and practice of the 
different reHgions of the world. His son went 
on with this after the father's death, and one 
day offered the whole collection to the City 
of Paris, who built a large museum to hold 
it, called it after the name of the donor, and 
put in the son as director, who is still there. 

Plow many people you meet in France who 
collect, and what a price is put upon freedom 
here; upon time and liberty for following con- 
genial occupations! "I am glad there are 
people in the word unselfish enough to be 



2o8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

great capitalists, to manage railways and cor- 
porations for my benefit," a Frenchman said 
to me not long ago. "They leave me free to 
spend my time on collecting and other things 
which really interest me." 

So many of the museums are only collec- 
tions abandoned to the State in their entirety 
by different individuals imbued with this spirit. 
The Musee Cernuski is one of these. It is 
made up of a great number of objects pertain- 
ing to Oriental art which the political econo- 
mist Cernuski brought back from his travels 
in Asia and left to the State, with his own 
beautiful hotel in which to put them. Gustave 
Moreau, the painter, followed his example, and 
the greater part of his works have been classi- 
fied with pious care by his disciples, in the 
house where he once lived, which has become 
the Musee Gustave Moreau. 

If you tried to describe all the little individ- 
ual museums within the great museums which 
have been given to the State in this way to 
complete the national collections, it would take 
not only the whole of one book, but of many. 
To mention only a few, however, what is said 
to be the richest collection of Chinese ceramics 
in the world is that in the wing of the Louvre 
lying along the Seine. It was given only a few 
years ago by a M. Grandidier, who still goes 
on classifying it and perfecting it at his own 
expense. Two-thirds of the lovely things in 




In the Garden of the Tuileries. 




The Tuilerie Gardens, Rue de Rivoli side. 



THE LITTLE MUSEUMS. 209 

the department of the art of the Renaissance 
in the Louvre were the princely gift of a sim- 
ple employe of the administration, named 
Sauvegeot, who collected them at a time when 
Renaissance art was disdained by nearly every- 
body else. In the section of painting the en- 
tire collection La Caze was left in 1870 by a 
Dr. Louis La Caze, who lived in the happy 
time when he could become the possessor of a 
chef d'oeuvre Hke Rembrandt's "Bethsabee" 
for 6,000 francs. At Cluny the salle devoted 
to objects pertaining to the Jewish religion is 
a gift of the Baroness Nathaniel de Rothschild. 

In the Luxembourg almost all of the salle of 
impressionist painting, of such value for the 
study of French art, is a legacy of the painter 
Caillebotte. And, of course, if we went back 
very far in this sort of history we should come 
to the royal collections which were the founda- 
tions of the museums themselves. 

When we come to think of knowing, or even 
getting a fairly satisfactory idea of the great 
ensemble of these precious collections, I am 
afraid the only way to do it would be to em- 
ploy some such prescription as that of Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes for seeing the British 
Museum: "Take lodgings next door to it — in a 
garret, if you cannot afford anything better — 
and pass all your days at the Museum during 
the whole period of your natural life. At three- 
score and ten you will have some faint concep- 



210 PARIS AS IT IS. 

tion of the contents, significance and value of 
this great British institution." He could easily 
tell people, he said, how not to see it. When they 
had a spare hour, let them drop in and wander 
around. In fact, he seems to have come away 
from the galleries with the same feeling such 
places so often give the rest of us, of leaving 
in our memory nothing but a confused mass of 
impressions, much as the soldiers who sack a 
city go off with all the precious things they 
can snatch up, muddled into clothes — bags and 
pillow-cases. Dr. Holmes was an old man 
when he wrote this, but Hawthorne in his 
prime spoke in the same way, I remember. He 
was so tired when he saw the Elgin marbles 
that he wished they were all pounded up and 
made into mortar, so that he should not feel 
obliged to look at them. 

There is one way of always being able at least 
to enjoy these Paris museums, and that is to 
consider them not as isolated collections, but 
as all belonging to one great family, of which 
each member helps to complete or explain 
or introduce the other, so that even a few 
minutes with any one fits in with our general 
acquaintance or intimacy with all, and gives 
us pleasure. It is a family, too, whose inti- 
mate history we are allowed to know, from its 
early beginnings down to its living types of 
to-day, and nothing else can teach us so much 
about what is the most interesting thing in 



THE LITTLE MUSEUMS. 211 

this world for study, the endless forms of de- 
velopment and expression of the human 
mind. 

To show how one museum completes an- 
other, we need only take French painting, 
whose history can be studied in Paris from its 
very earliest origins. But we should have a 
very imperfect idea of the decorative sumptu- 
ousness belonging to the period of Louis XIV. 
which was sought for by such painters as Le- 
brun, Mignard and Rigaud, if we were satis- 
fied simply to look at their work strung out in 
line in a salle of the Louvre. We must go to 
Versailles — so near Paris that it may be 
counted as a Parisian museum — and see the 
works of that time installed in the very places 
for whose decoration they were intended. The 
same thing is true for the time of Louis XV. 
and Louis XVL 

The painting of the time of the Revolution 
has some curious specimens, which we must 
look for at the Musee Carnavalet, side by side 
with the armoire from the Bastile, the flags of 
the national guards, the vitrines of uniforms of 
the "incroyables" and the "merveilleuses," if 
we want to appreciate the transition they mark 
between the art of a century ago and that of 
to-day. As for contemporary painting, it is 
clear that the Luxembourg is the indispensable 
sequel to the Louvre; but in its turn it is com- 
pleted by the Musee de la Ville de Paris, at 



212 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Auteuil, and the galleries of the Hotel de Ville, 
the only places in which you can see a deco- 
rative ensemble of Puvis de Chavannes, 

I have already said that Oriental art was 
divided between the Louvre, the collection 
Grandidier and the Musee Cernuski. But to 
these must be added the Musee des Religions, 
where there is a complete series of the potter- 
ies used in the religions of India, China and 
Japan; and the Musee de Cluny, which con- 
tains a magnificent collection of the faiences of 
Rhodes. The finest arms and armor in France 
are in the Louvre, the Musee d' Artillerie, 
Cluny, and for very early times, in the Museum 
of St. Germain. 

As to the history of the mobilier — beds, ta- 
bles, stools and candlesticks — so intimately al- 
lied to that of the other arts, we should know 
nothing about it at all if we judged of it only 
by a State bed at the Louvre, or a Boule ar- 
moires. We must study it successively at Cluny 
up to Louis XIIL, at the Musee du Garde- 
Meuble from Louis XIV. to Napoleon L, and 
at Carnavalet for the First Empire and the 
Revolution. For the history of hangings we 
have a series of tapestries at the Musee des 
Gobelins. 

And even all this great number of varied and 
beautiful specimens would not be enough to 
evoke the entire history of the meuble if, scat- 
tered about everywhere, in almost ever^^ house, 



THE LITTLE MUSEUMS. 213 

we did not find what might be called living 
types of all these successive styles which have 
served workmen as models. In the beginning 
I said that Paris was a city of museums, but 
perhaps this is not quite accurate. The whole 
of Paris is nothing but one great museum. 



Les Invalides, 

Louis XIV., a contemporary of the author 
of some of the most fantastic fairy-tales ever 
written, Perraut, the writer of ''Asses' Skin," 
"The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" and 'The 
Blue Bird," would have treated it as a more 
fantastic fairy-tale still if anyone had told 
him that less than a century after his reign the 
throne of France would escape from the Bour- 
bons to fall into the hands of a little ofificer 
from Corsica. 

What would he have said if someone had 
gone on to predict that under the auspices of 
one of his own descendants, Louis Philippe, this 
same soldier of fortune would one day be in- 
terred in that very palace of the Invalides 
which he had built as a magnificent monument 
to the military glory of his own reign? 

All this has been made possible by those two 
great levelers, death and time. Not only is no 
one indignant, but no one is even surprised 
now at seeing the imperial eagle by the side of 
the royal sun. More than that,, the imperial 
eagle has even eclipsed the royal sun with the 
shadow of its wings; for who thinks of Louis 

214 



LES INVALIDES. 215 

XIV. at the Invalides? No one goes there but 
to see the tomb of the Great Emperor. 

It v>^as in 1840 that the ashes of Napoleon 
were brought to Paris. They were carried to 
their last resting-place on a chariot drawn by 
twenty-four horses harnessed four abreast, and 
caparisoned with violet velvet. On either side 
of these walked under-officers of the Guard, 
bearing the standards of eighty-six depart- 
ments. All the way the great bourdon of Notre 
Dame, tolled only for kings and emperors, 
sounded out its solemn voice. In the midst of 
the Guard walked two Marshals, an Admiral, 
and General Bertrand, who had come on from 
St. Helena. To the General Louis Philippe 
handed the Emperor's sword, with the words: 
"General Bertrand, place Napoleon's sword 
upon his coffin." And General Bertrand 
obeyed, with tears streaming down his cheeks. 
Then General Gourgaud, also in tears, placed 
the Emperor's gray cocked hat next his 
sword; and thus all that was left of the great 
genius who was not only the greatest con- 
queror, but also the greatest slayer of men, 
found its eternal repose. 

To-day, under the gilded dome you will see 
pilgrims from all parts of the world who have 
come to look at the Emperor's tomb. Lean- 
ing over the marble balustrade, silently they 
look down into the round hole of the crypt 
upon the gigantic sarcophagus of blood-red 



2i6 PARIS AS IT IS. 

stone. Around it are twelve great victories, 
sculptured by Pradier, in the form of twelve 
female figures, holding in their hands funeral 
wreaths and palms; and twelve bundles of 
flags taken at Austerlitz. In the cold light 
which fills the place the twelve stone god- 
desses take the aspect of phantoms, and the 
standards the pale tone of faded flowers. It 
is an admirable setting for this mighty sarco- 
phagus, with its cover suggesting a Hon's 
claws in repose. 

In spite of the fact that certain details show 
a want of taste, — such, for instance, as the yel- 
low-green and violet mosaic of the floor, — and 
that there is too much theatrical striving for 
effect in the artificial blue light which illumi-- 
nates the tomb, opposed to a flood of yellow 
light falHng upon the altar opposite, you feel, 
nevertheless, a choking of the throat as you 
look, from the ever-poignant emotion of stand- 
ing in presence of the dust of what was once 
so great. But as you turn away your eyes fall 
upon the inscription placed on the door of the 
crypt: "I desire that my ashes repose on the 
banks of the Seine, in the midst of that French 
people whom I have so loved." If you are like 
me, you can not help a slight feeling of regret 
that this last wish of the Emperor was not 
taken more literally. I could have wished that 
his mausoleum had been raised on the very 
edge of the Seine, at the other end of the 




Napoleon's Tomb at the Hotel des Invalides. 



LES INVALIDES. 217 

Champs de Mars, in the form of an immense 
monumental stone, upon which the sculptor 
had carved nothing but the cocked hat, the 
gray redingote, the sword of the officer, and 
the sceptre sown with bees, of the Emperor 
I am not a lover of the Pantheons of great 
men, and it does not seem to me fitting that 
Napoleon should have been put in the house of 
Louis XIV. Louis Philippe, perhaps, was 
actuated by some such idea as that which in- 
spired the celebrated history of Napoleon by 
the Jesuit, Pere Loriquet. He treated the 
Emperor simply as a general; and the con- 
quest of Europe was spoken of only as a 
series of campaigns undertaken in the service 
of Louis XVIIL As a matter of fact, I have 
heard that Louis Philippe did affect to con- 
sider Napoleon only as a link in an inter- 
rupted monarchy, and that in showing this 
honor to the founder of a new dynasty his 
idea was to add to the glory of his own 
ancestor. 

When you are most moved in Les Invalides, 
however, is not, to my mind, in the midst of all 
these complicated mortuary splendors, but 
when in the Museum of Artillery adjoining 
you stand before the cocked hat and gray red- 
ingote that Napoleon actually wore on the 
battlefield, the swallow-tail coat of Austerlitz, 
and the dressing-gown of St. Helena. It is 
these faded and moth-eaten garments which 



2i8 PARIS AS IT IS. 

bring us closest to him, and move us more by 
their simplicity than everything else by its 
magnificence. 

You may say the same for the armor of 
Louis XIV., in an adjoining room, so astonish- 
ingly modest for a sovereign so great, es- 
pecially by the side of the gilded armor of those 
princes of the Renaissance, Francois ler, Henri 
III., Charles IX. Truly, the greatest men 
are the simplest. And what most touches us 
among all the things that man has made is 
what brings us closest to man. 



The Mode. 

The Mode lives in Paris in the Rue de la 
Paix. Who installed her there, where she 
came from, and why she has always preferred 
Paris to any other home, is something I only 
succeeded in satisfying myself about lately. 
Her principal associate seems to be art. The 
French always say, 'TArt et la Mode." They 
link the two together as though they had 
some relation; and, as a matter of fact, when 
we look back over their history they seem both 
to have followed pretty much the same lines. 
In the time of the Second Empire, for instance, 
when all art was artificial, the mode put on 
hoop-skirts. Then art gradually took nature 
for her inspiration, and mode simply gathered 
her petticoats more and more closely about 
her and followed on. Now, pretty much all 
she pretends to do is to drape in some sort of 
way the lines of the human figure. She used 
to include sewing. But art doesn't sew. That 
is the reason why the new Paris frock some- 
times comes to pieces. 

I used to wonder which of these two came 
first, as in the eternal problem of the owl and 
the eggs. ''When I think of the beauty of the 

219 



220 PARIS AS IT IS. 

full-fledged owl," Froude made the bird of 
Minerva say upon this subject, "I should say 
it was the owl. But when I consider my own 
childhood, I am incHned to think it was the 
egg." History I found quite powerless to en- 
lighten me upon this in respect to art and 
mode. In the reign of Louis XIV. art was 
pompous; and so was mode. So was every- 
thing, for that matter, woman herself; at least, 
the only sort of woman that either of those two 
ever took any notice of. It was only the offi- 
cial woman, the woman of the court, that they 
considered worthy of taking into account. In 
the epoch of Louis XV. which do you say was 
the earHer, the pleat or Watteau? It was a 
wanton, voluptuous time, and the style for 
everything and everybody was to be dans Ic 
lache, as the French say. Did the painter get 
those loose, flowing robes from the women; or 
did he invent them, and the women follow on? 
By the time the reign of Louis XVI. was in 
full swing Rousseau had started a great craze 
for the country woman, the child; everything 
that was simple and pastoral. Mode, always 
an extremist, went in for nothing else. She 
thought of nothing but fichus, garden hats, 
baby shoes. On every occasion she insisted 
on playing the part of the guileless shepherdess. 
In those days she had a much less fickle, 
changeable character than now. She remained 
the same for ten years, twenty years, at a time. 



THE MODE. 221 

All the women bowed down to her blindly. 
There was no personal taste; no such thing 
existed. Fashion was an absolute monarch. 

Oddly enough, no photographs nor draw- 
ings of her were made in the early times. Her 
counterfeit presentment was seen in a life-size 
doll which was dressed in the latest style of 
Versailles or the Palais-Royal and called La 
Ponpee de la Rue Saini-Honore. Then repli- 
cas of this were sent to England, Germany, 
Italy and Spain and set up before the eyes 
of the courts, very much as the Buddhists and 
the Brahmists set up their goddesses. Cather- 
ine de Medici, I learned from the French 
archives, had sixteen of these dolls, and she 
dressed them in mourning after the death 
of her husband to correspond with her black- 
hung walls. It was not until the middle of the 
eighteenth century that some ingenious per- 
son conceived the idea of getting up whole 
newspapers devoted to nothing but mode, and 
called fashion journals. In the early adver- 
tisements of these it was said: "Dolls are al- 
ways imperfect and very dear; while at best 
they can give but a vague idea of the fashions." 
Some of the figures in these early fashion pa- 
pers were exquisite. If you want to see any of 
them to go to the Muse Carnavalet. They are 
really artistic and thoroughly charming in 
color. The new French fashion journals had 
an immense influence on Europe. Mode was 



222 PARIS AS IT IS. 

French by birth. She had an ItaHan relation 
or two, but they were stiff, grandiloquent crea- 
tures, who stalked around in palaces and got 
themselves up to represent their parts, what- 
ever they imagined those were. In the time 
of Henry IV. there were some Italian ateliers 
for mode at Fontainebleau. But she was purely 
French, as I said before. She became a great 
queen, and anyone who has read the first chap- 
ter of this book will understand why, with 
such a universal standard of taste in France, 
everybody was ready to be influenced by her. 
Look now at a French fete, or function of any 
sort. Everybody is en toilette, and there is not 
a woman in the country, even the humblest I 
imagine, who does not have something pretty 
to put on poitr sortir. Feminine French in- 
stinct could never feel itself jarring on the 
landscape, and inventive genius and delicate 
taste in dress have been from all time natural 
gifts of the French people. Through the fash- 
ion papers the fame of this French mode 
spread all over Europe in the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Every country became subject to her, 
and tributary to the commerce and industry of 
the French capital. 

There were no dressmakers, as we under- 
stand the word, in that day. There were mer- 
chants. There was a nomniee Bertin in the 
eighteenth century, who seems to have got 
herself a good deal talked about. There was 




The Flower Market. 




In a Fiacre. 



THE MODE. 223 

the little milliner, the dealer in what were 
called ''fanfreluches," all sorts of feminine tri- 
fles. The great high priest of mode was the 
coififeur; we find famous artists in that line, 
such as Legros, Frederic and Leonard; and 
they adapted not only the whole art of archi- 
tecture to their hair-dressing, but every new 
craze in society. Mode, who, as we have seen, 
always went in for everything, even insisted on 
wearing the new discovery of vaccination in 
some way, and Legros invented for her the 
coiffure a ["inoculation. Soon every lady in 
Paris wore on her head an allegory symbol- 
izing the triumph of this new discovery, 
through a serpent, a club, a rising sun, and an 
olive tree covered with fruit. Much more re- 
markable still, however, must have been those 
ladies crowned with coififures representing 
English parks, with nothing forgotten; mead- 
ows, trees, babbling brooks, and even a flock 
of sheep grazing. All these strange fancies 
you can find in the old prints of the Biblio- 
theque Nationale. 

I have spoken of th^ reign of Louis XIV. As 
is natural to suppose. Napoleon paid great trib- 
ute to mode, who was a queen after his own 
heart. He obliged the generals and other 
members of his court to give their wives plenty 
of money for dress, and himself paid great at- 
tention to the, toilettes of the court ladies. Na- 
poleon had not a fine taste, and what best 



224 PARIS AS IT IS. 

pleased him was magnificence; frocks loaded 
with diamonds and precious stones. Dur- 
ing his time the great coififeur was Mich- 
alon, who drove a cabriolet with a ne- 
gro behind, and charged a louis for 
dressing a woman's head. It was in 
that day that the celebrated trial between the 
hairdressers and the wigmakers came ofif, 
when the latter, jealous of the coiffeurs, tried 
to keep them from practicing their art. The 
coiffeurs triumphed. It is curious to see the 
records of this famous case. Hairdressing was 
one of the liberal arts, having for its aim the 
representation of beauty in the same way as 
the poet, the painter or the sculptor. Women 
were never so badly dressed as in the time of 
Louis Philippe, and in the Second Empire all 
art was false, as I said before. And this brings 
us near enough to the present day for us to 
get things at first hand. From that time on it is 
no longer natural for one to personify mode. 
She takes an entirely different aspect in my im- 
agination. In that day there arose a Louis XIV. 
in dressmaking, who, oddly enough, was an 
Englishman. His name was Worth. Worth 
was the father of modern dressmaking. It was 
he who had the idea of centralization. A mod- 
ern dressmaking house is also a house for 
stuffs, laces, passementeries, embroideries, a 
thousand and one fancies in material decora- 
tion. Worth was not an artist; he thought of 



THE MODE. 225 

the dress and not the female figure. "II a com- 
pris les robes; il n'a pas compris la femme," 
as an authority with whom I was once talking 
put it. Worth forced and stimulated every 
branch of industry pertaining to feminine 
things, and whole new houses sprung up for 
specialties. All the various parts of the dress 
were specialized also, so that now every dress 
turned out from a great house represents the 
work of at least ten special workmen; one for 
the sleeves, for instance ; one for the collar, one 
even for the facing. 

The whole sociological evolution is so intri- 
cate, one part so reacts upon another, that, 
strangely enough, a curious new element en- 
tered into fashions with the rise of fortune 
in dressmakers. The sons of these great 
wealthy heads of houses were entirely 
different types of individuals from their 
fathers — purely business men. We find 
many courtly old-fashioned gentlemen among 
these dressmakers of the old school, of 
which M. Doucet, pere, was an example; but 
there were no artists. The idea was still al- 
ways the dress, not the lines and delicate har- 
monies and nuances of color, as it is to-day. 
We are now in the domain of fact, however. 
It is easy to learn from the great authorities of 
the mode just how fashions are made; and, as a 
matter of fact, fashion follows the general soci- 
ological evolution, especially in art. Art comes 



226 PARIS AS IT IS. 

first. A universal knowledge of art in France 
forms a universal standard of taste; through 
this women's ideas and fancies are formed; the 
dressmakers are simply mediums for the ex- 
pression of the passing prominent ideal. 

M. Jacques Doucet, the second of the old 
house of the Rue de la Paix, was the founder 
of the last school of art in fashions. His father 
had made a fortune, and the son, a man of thor- 
oughly artistic temperament and remarkable 
taste, became the friend of the impressionist 
painters, like Monet, Manet, etc. At one time 
he was just about to start a fashion paper with 
colored plates done by Monet and Miss Cas- 
satt. It was M. Jacques Doucet who brought 
all the formulas of the art of the day into 
woman's dress; the line, contrasts and har- 
monies of color, for instance. The Salon for 
this art is the stage. 

In half the theatres in Paris you found the 
stage was nothing else but a Salon for mode. 
Nothing is played in them but society plays 
written for toilettes, and the galaxy of pretty 
and elegant actresses who wear them so de- 
lightfully. Where is the simplicity of the great ac- 
tress of the Frangais, Mile. Mars, for instance, 
with her tiny account book in puce-colored silk 
marked "Souvenir" in seed pearls, and such 
entries as: Expenses for the month of Octo- 
ber: 12 fr. for galloons; 13 fr. for a carpet; 20 
fr. for a powder puf¥; 7 fr. for sundries. What 



THE MODE. 227 

a long way from that to one single gown for 
an actress of the Vaudeville or the Gymnase 
to-day; some such thing as mousseline de soie 
hand-painted by a Salon artist, incrusted with 
the rarest lace and embroidered with seed 
pearls. The 'Varnishing days" of these frocks 
are great Parisian events. All Paris is present 
at a fashionable premiere, while the great 
dressmaker sits in his loge and watches with 
mingled pride and misgiving the effect of his 
creations on the sensitive Parisian public. 

It is curious to see how everything in art 
passes into fashions. Here is the history of 
one: Every great house has attached to it its 
artists, its designers, who have special genius 
for mode, and not only make the sketches, but 
see them put into execution. With a man- 
nikin and a premiere they drape, pin, match 
colors, combine harmonies, till the idea of the 
dress is sketched on the living model. Mode 
does not aim to do much fine sewing now- 
adays. Once the impression is there, fashion 
is satisfied. I once happened to see one of 
these designers making a model. It was of 
black mousseHne de soie over an interlining 
of soft grey mousseline de soie, and charming 
in shape and line. The designer, you could 
see, was not satisfied. Something was want- 
ing. She sent for mousseline in all tints, veiled 
her lining first with blue, then rose, then 
mauve, which under the black made a faint 



228 PARIS AS IT IS, 

iridescence. The eye was satisfied, and a new 
fashion was born. All the great furnishers of 
Paris went to work making rainbow gauzes 
and other iridescent things. All that came 
from Loie Fuller's influence on art. She 
came just at a moment when the impression- 
ists had trained the eye to nuances; she embod- 
ied this whole movement. All this reacted on 
dressmaking. 

M, Jacques Doucet in mode, Mme. Reboux 
in millinery, have been two great moulders of 
this mode. But fashion is ever capricious, vol- 
atile, changeable, in these days. Other great 
creators came up, such as Paquin and Carlier, 
for instance, like new artists and men of 
letters. Everybody studies the old models. At 
Carlier's they will show you rare old books 
picked up on the quays and in old shops 
which give all the models in mode since first 
there was a fashion in bonnets. Sumptuous 
and fascinating palaces are these great dress- 
making houses to-day where in a background 
of pure style the daintiest women of the world 
congregate in an atmosphere of color, ele- 
gance, luxury and art. 



The Studios, 

We speak of the great family of artists, and 
as a matter of fact the artists in Paris form 
a great family, in the sense that they all have 
certain common traits. They get pretty much 
the same sort of education in the studios, 
have much the same aim in life, which is to 
win fame through their art, and have a gen- 
eral horror of politics, of bureaucracy, and of 
the ''bourgeois," as such. As in all families, 
among them there are the grandfathers, cov- 
ered with honors, whom the younger genera- 
tions chaff, and who revenge themselves by 
declaring that everything was better in the old 
times. Then there are the fathers, beginning 
to turn gray, who cannot resign themselves 
to the thought that their fame is on the wane, 
and go about reiterating the ideas they were 
the first to launch, but which long ago be- 
came common property. There are the sons, 
from thirty-five to forty-five, in the prime of 
life and the full force of their powers. And 
there are the young men, full of hope, audacity 
and supreme disdain for everything that has 
gone before them. Quite apart and by him- 
self was Puvis de Chavannes, who up to the 

229 



230 PARIS AS IT IS. 

very moment of his death went on creating 
chef-d'oeuvres in which there was not the 
slightest sign of waning force, and Hving so 
absorbed by his poetic reveries that he was 
entirely unconscious of the monastic simplic- 
ity of his surroundings, or of the degree to 
which he towered above his contemporaries. 
In this great family it is, on the whole, the 
men of from thirty-five to forty-five, in the 
prime of life, who are the most interesting. As 
a matter of fact, many of the grandfathers, 
and even some of the fathers, never were quite 
what their reputations made them. They 
were "formed" in the second Empire, in that 
time of artificiality and bad taste in art when 
Puvis was laughed at, bottles of ink were 
thrown at the statues of Carpeaux, when 
Whistler, Claude Monet, Ribot, Manet, all 
the painters, in short, who went directly to 
nature for their inspirations, were refused at 
the Salons. What is left of these over-esti- 
mated reputations? Decorations, autographs 
of kings and princes, and popularity with the 
people who measure talent by official honors, 
and the patent to immortality given by the title 
of Academician. For many years most of them 
have stood still. M. Bouguereau, for instance, 
is tranquilly going on painting precisely the 
same nymphs and cupids, in precisely the same 
tones of cold-cream, that he made thirty years 
ago. M. Bonnat paints presidents of the Re- 



THE STUDIOS. 831 

public year after year, each more chocolate in 
tone than the last. M. Gerome seems to have 
turned from infantile scenes which look as 
though they had been punched out of the can- 
vas only to make sculpture that is equally un- 
interesting and equally uninspired. 

When we come to the fathers we find they 
show the effects of the impulse toward sincer- 
ity and naturalism which came with the Re- 
public; but many of these men of talent, and 
often of great talent, apparently gave up try- 
ing to create at least fifteen years ago, and 
since then keep repeating themselves. The 
evolution of art has gone on around them; it 
has left them turning in the same place. Some 
of them, the portrait painters in particular, 
seem to have given themselves up to the 
pure joy of making money. We still find 
many historical painters. They have pro- 
gressed in the sense that they paint new 
subjects. M. Jean Paul Laurens, an admira- 
ble painter of historical scenes, has gone from 
the Middle Ages to the time of Napoleon. 
They do not seem to realize, however, that it 
is not the subject, but the genre, that has gone 
by. The impressionists have so accustomed us 
now to finding light and color vibrating in all 
pictures, as they do everything in nature itself, 
that the artificial painting of history no 
longer delights us. More than that, it even 
shocks us a little; just as an artificial stage 



232 PARIS AS IT IS. 

setting seems coarse by the side of real fields 
and real woods. 

Charming paintings of real fields and real 
woods we do find from some of the older 
men, evidently excellent pupils of Bastien 
Lepage. But Bastien Lepage died young. If 
he had lived he would surely have been the 
first to profit by the impressionists and put 
more color and warmth into his delicate, ethe- 
real grays. Much as I enjoy Roll and Raphael 
Collin, I always wish they had not stopped at 
Bastien Lepage. 

What a change has come over the spirit of 
landscape painting in these last years. A half a 
century ago landscape painting was literary. 
When Guizot ordered for himself from Rous- 
seau a view of the Chateau de BrogHe, where 
he had spent some time with his wife, who 
had died, he asked the painter to make it "of 
a sad and grave character, in harmony with 
his feelings." It is rare that a literary man 
of great breadth does not find a Hterary in- 
terest in a great landscape even now. Puvis 
de Chavannes's "Summer" Melchior de 
Vogue called "A Social Evangel." In 
Courbet's "Les Demoiselles du Bord de la 
Seine" Prud'hon found a "romance of the 
contemporary woman." Poussin and Claude 
Lorrain generally put literary interest into 
their pictures. They painted from nature; 
but from a great many sketches they made 



THE STUDIOS. 233 

a composed picture and gave it some literary 
or historical meaning. 

The old Dutch masters painted Nature with- 
out troubling themselves much about giv- 
ing her a literary meaning, but they paid no 
attention to light. They did not paint "the 
moment," and they often put the sunlight 
into the picture in the studio, after it was 
done. The personages were added in the 
same way, and neither they nor anything else 
were affected by the sun. It was Turner who 
first began to experiment with light and to 
paint Nature in all the real splendor of her 
light and color. He was the first impression- 
ist, to call him that for want of a better name. 

Then in France came Corot, who was the 
father of the French impressionists. He 
painted the "moment"; but only one mo- 
ment. It is always twiHght for his nymphs; 
"those frail, diaphanous figures, whose trem- 
ulous white feet seem not to touch the 
dew-drenched grass they tread on." He was 
the first painter to make everything — the 
hour, the personages, the landscape — unite to 
give a single harmonious impression; and he 
was the precursor of Monet, Sisley, Pisarro, 
Berthe Morissot, who reproduced every mo- 
ment, and made those studies of the atmos- 
phere which have had such an influence on the 
evolution of art. 

You might say that Monet actually tamed 



234 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the sunlight. He caught and kept it in a 
canvas, by using the very processes of na- 
ture herself; the decomposition of light into 
its prismatic colors, and the shock of one of 
these against another. I remember one in par- 
ticular which especially showed this. Near at 
hand it was nothing but a crescent of yellow 
paint, left apparently just as it had oozed out 
of the tube, in the centre of a mass of thick 
daubs of blue. The shock of the two colors, 
calculated with infinite art, made the picture 
from a distance a little white boat with lumi- 
nous sails, sailing over a sunlit sea. This study 
of the atmosphere so new and so fascinating 
entirely took possession of Monet. His pic- 
tures are instantaneous mental photographs, 
as it were. He paints not the hour, but the 
fraction of the hour; and he paints nothing 
more in nature than that. Meanwhile other 
men have profited by his investigations and 
those of the other impressionists, and carried 
them on. One group in the Salon of the 
Champ de Mars, nearly all from thirty-five to 
forty-five, is not only especially remarkable, 
but especially characteristic of the last for- 
ward step in the art of the end of the nine- 
teenth century. The impressionists broke 
with everything that had gone before them. 
The "new" landscape painters inherit not 
only from the Monets and Sisleys, but from 
the Peruginos, Velasquezs, Qaude Lorrains. 



THE STUDIOS. 235 

They reproduce the ''moment," making every- 
thing in the picture harmonize, the objects, 
the personages, the emotion awakened by 
the moment; but at the same time they 
keep in sight the great masters of the past, in 
particular the one who specially appeals to the 
temperament of each. These are the ''cher- 
cheurs" of to-day, as the others were of twen- 
ty-five years ago. 

Among the younger men take M. Cottet, for 
instance, one of the most personal of the 
group. He is a Savoyard, who was born 
among the mountains overlooking Lake 
Geneva. He never lost his love for the rude, 
simple Hfe of his boyhood, but he has trans- 
ported it to Brittany, where the types are 
more marked, where the struggle for exist- 
ence is more poignant, and where every day 
some drama is played in wresting a livelihood 
from the eternally savage sea. How does 
he manage to paint these primitive fisher 
folk so simply, so naturally, and yet give 
such impressions of the underlying in- 
tensity, the tragedy of their lives? His special 
master is Puvis de Chavannes, and he uses the 
same methods as Puvis. Look at the scene in 
the Life of St. Genevieve, in the Pantheon, 
where St. Remy is blessing St. Genevieve as a 
little girl. What is there in it? It is only a 
child of the people, by whose side a man has 
stopped as he rode by on horseback to lay a 



236 PARIS AS IT IS. 

hand on her head; but it is from the entire 
composition, the hour, the Hues, even the sim- 
plicity, of the landscape, with its spare clumps 
of trees in the background, the tall pines in the 
foreground, that we get the intense impression 
of solemnity, of something beyond the ordi- 
nary in the whole. 

M. Cottet uses the same method. One of the 
last things I saw in his studio was a remark- 
able canvas he had just finished for the Ex- 
position of 1900, 'The Fire of the Pardon of 
St. John." The peasants in the part of Brit- 
tany it represented believe fire sacred, and it 
was from the ensemble, the mysterious awe 
in the kneeling figures gathered round the 
sweeping, flaring flame, the lonely hour, the 
primitive country, the suggestion of the sea at 
hand, from the light, the color, that the mystic 
beauty and power of the whole came. For this 
M. Cottet had sketched six years, noting 
everything that would contribute to the im- 
pression for which he was working,* eliminat- 
ing everything that was foreign to it, and com- 
bining all finally into one composed whole. 

One of the chief pleasures you get from M. 
Cottet's painting is in his use of color. He 
is extremely personal in his use of it, with 
what the French call "les violences et 
les chatouillements," peculiar to himself. 
Oddly enough in the beginning he was an ex- 
treme impressionist. By a happy chance he 



THE STUDIOS. 237 

met Simon and Menard in an exhibition of 
pictures, found them sympathetic, attached 
himself to them, and ended by modifying his 
exaggerations of his palette. He has a beauti- 
ful studio in the Rue Notre Dame des 
Champs, just over Whistler's, where he re- 
ceives on Wednesdays. M. Cottet is a sensitif 
in the extreme, vv^ho hides before the world an 
underlying vein of melancholy — result of the 
tragic death of several near friends — ^by a 
fund of wit and drollery. 

M. Rene Menard, of whom I have just 
spoken, is another of this group who has 
achieved fame before forty. His father was a 
famous savant in the art, and his uncle a re- 
markable student of Grecian archaeology. 
Brought up by these two, the boy Menard, 
who was in the Beaux Arts while he was yet in 
knickerbockers, peopled nature with nymphs 
and goddesses; and the man adapts beautiful 
impressionist landscapes taken from the forest 
of Fontainebleau, from Southern Brittany or 
from Normandy to Greek scenes. This ex- 
quisite perfume of antiquity which, in spite of 
himself, he puts into everything is one great 
charm of his painting. He, also, composes one 
picture from many sketches. Look at his 
"Terre Antique," just bought by the State 
for the Luxembourg. Even the clouds carry 
out the impression of the lonely grandeur of 
the Temple of Agrigentum, on the antique 



238 PARIS AS IT IS. 

soil of Sicily. They seem like the gods, depart- 
ing. M. Menard prepares the canvas a year 
before painting a picture, and it is this which 
gives to everything by him its mellowness 
and iridescence. He has the most interesting 
studio I know of, because its entire ensemble 
is such an expression of an artistic personality. 
To begin with, it shows all his love for method 
and for delicate nuances. It is a marvelous ar- 
rangement of objects chosen for beauty of 
color or form; potteries, tiles from Persia in 
strange tones, antique glasses, tapestries, and 
many curious things he has picked up in his 
travels simply for their tones, such as ckardons 
from Palestine, twisted pine-roots from the 
gorges of Tarn, pebbles covered with golden 
lichens gathered in the lost islands of Finis- 
terre. 

The painter himself, a tall, fine-looking 
man, is goodness, serenity and indulgence 
personified, and his Mondays are rare days 
when interesting people group together, and 
the host, who is a delightful raconteur, is the 
soul of everything. His childhood was spent 
in Barbizon, and he has a fund of charming 
anecdotes of Corot, Rousseau, Dupre, all the 
painters of the Barbizon school, who were in- 
timate friends of his father. Here is one 
taken at random: One day, as Dupre was 
working near the ''mare aux fees'' in the for- 
est of Fontainebleau, a young man came up 



THE STUDIOS. 239 

with a sketch and begged him to criticize it. 
The master made a grimace. There was noth- 
ing in it— neither drawing, nor color, nor 
promise of any sort. The youth Insisted 
on a criticism. ''Very well, here it is, 
then," said Dupre, and with three or four 
vigorous strokes of the brush he demolished 
the picture entirely. Instead of appearing 
ofifended, the youth thanked him warmly and, 
walked ofif. Dupre had reason to meet him 
again, and he had profited by the severe lesson. 
It was Troyon. 

M. Simon, another of the remarkable men of 
this school, is emphatically a chercheur, an ex- 
perimenter. A certain private fortune has 
always kept him above the necessity of con- 
sidering art from its commercial side, and it is 
perhaps to this that France owes the "Cirque 
Forain'' and the "Portraits de Mes Amis," 
those two remarkable pictures which many 
amateurs and lovers of art in Paris have said 
were in themselves sufBcient to found a 
school. The group of portraits, which, hap- 
pily for America, has been bought by Pitts- 
burg for the Carnegie Institute (the portraits 
are of Menard, Cottet, Dauchez, and Edmond 
and Andre Saglio) is the sort of painting which 
Diderot loved. It has the qualities of the 
greatest painting in color, composition, tem- 
perament and light. M. Simon's favorite mas- 
ters are Velasquez and Frans Hals. He 



240 PARIS AS IT IS. 

prepares the sketches for his Brittany 
pictures during the ihree months he spends 
in Benodet in the summer, and executes 
the personages as far as possible in 
superb aquarelles. Then in his studio in 
Paris he paints the whole picture at a single 
stretch, putting into it an energy and force 
which leaves him completely exhausted when 
it is finished. 

He is slight, delicately built, reserved with 
strangers, excellent and pleasant with those 
he knows, and a man of the most ex- 
treme sensibility. I heard him confess one 
morning to not having slept at all that night 
because he had read the evening before that 
the drought was going to ruin the peasants of 
several provinces. He has the extreme versa- 
tility of the cultivated Frenchman, and his 
first successes were in literature, in brilliant 
short stories which he published in Gil Bias. 
In his conversation he has a rare facility 
for finding the exact expression; for launch- 
ing those *'mots qui enlevent le morceau," as 
the French say. It was the taste of his young 
wife for painting which decided him, fortun- 
ately, to devote himself to art. She is an as- 
socie of the Champs de Mars, and does tinted 
drawings, very clever, full of charm, of an en- 
tirely diflferent style from her husband. They 
live on the Boulevard Montparnasse, in an 



THE STUDIOS. 241 

apartment with a studio arranged with exquis- 
ite taste. 

Mme. Simon's brother, Andre Dauchez, 
who Hves in the same house, and is a briUiant 
young painter of this same school, also does 
Brittany scenes. I know of no one who has 
ever given to a more remarkable degree the 
impression of great stretches of country on 
which men and women are toiling. I studied 
lately in Dauchez's studio a series of eight or 
ten sketches for one picture. It was interesting 
and suggestive to see the fashion in which he 
worked to get the dominant note of his impres- 
sion. In each sketch the figures, carefully 
drawn in the beginning, were a little more 
subordinated until they simply blended into 
the whole. 

MM. Cazin and Besnard are the older and 
famous masters of this school, whom I speak of 
after the others because, while they are among 
the great painters of this century, they no 
longer surprise, like the new men who are car- 
rying on the evolution of art. Cazin reminds 
you of one of those old Calvinist patriarchs 
who fled from the West to the North in the 
time of Louis XIV. to escape persecution. He 
is a thick-set, broad-shouldered man, with a 
long gray beard and long gray hair carefully 
arranged. He always wears a large gray cape 
and a high hat with a flat brim, and carries a 
long walking-stick studded with little symmet- 



242 PARIS AS IT IS. 

rical incrustations, with an ivory handle, which 
is nothing more or less than an old anne, a 
tailor's measure of the olden time, and this 
patriarchal appearance is further carried out 
by the old-fashioned courtesy of his manner. 

M. Cazin has moved from the West to 
the North, from Anjou to Picardy, but 
it was in no way to flee persecution. 
On the contrary, few men have had the 
satisfaction during their Hfetimes of seeing 
themselves, like him, considered as a great 
chief of modern landscape painting, and oi 
having their pictures bring the prices of the 
great masters of other times. Up to the 
age of forty or forty-two he lived at 
Angers entirely unknown. Each year he 
sent to the Salon his beautiful and poetic 
canvases. Each year they were a lit- 
tle higher skied. One day, however, two men 
noticed one of them. They were the sculptor 
Alfred Lenoir, and a friend of his, an architect. 
They wrote to Cazin to ask the price — 500 
francs. The two agreed to buy the picture 
in partnership and share its possession as well 
as the expense. Although it is worth now 
twenty thousand francs, they still own it in 
common, and every six months it passes from 
one to the other. 

Cazin has now bought up immense tracts 
of land in the Picardy, from which he got his 
finest inspirations, so that they may stay uncul- 




Bonnat's Studio. 




Besnard in His Studio. 



THE STUDIOS. 243 

tivated, and covered with those delicate trees 
and shrubs, those clumps of furze and gorse 
which we know so well. All over them he has 
stationed keepers, not to protect his game pre- 
serves, but his art preserves. He does not 
want the solitudes he loves peopled. 

You could not find a personality more the 
opposite of M. Cazin than M. Besnard. Bes- 
nard is an enormous man, who is always 
dressed by a London tailor, who wears nothing 
but English cravats, and would pass for an 
Englishman if it were not for the eye of the 
Latin. For that matter, he lived many 
years in London, where a certain side 
of English life appealed to him — the 
taste for sport and for out-door exercise. It 
was in London that he met his wife, a French- 
woman also living there, a sculptor of much 
talent. Something that he brought away with 
him from England was an irrestistibly funny 
manner of imitating the Englishman trying 
to talk French. Fie has often found it a 
fruitful source of amusement in traveling in 
France, where he has sometimes succeeded 
in mystifying a whole table d'hote. He is one 
of the men in Paris who has the most esprit. 

I once asked M. Besnard how he came to 
make his researches into light. He said it was 
the result of living in England. He was a ''Prix 
de Rome" and he went to England to refresh 
himself with more modern paintings than that 



244 PARIS AS IT IS. 

of Italy — the Turners and Sir Joshuas, for in- 
stance. The brilhancy of London life in 
the season led him to devote himself more and 
more to the study of color and light. When 
we think of it, nowhere but in London do we 
see so much color out of doors, in a setting of 
green. 

Besnard lives in a picturesque private hotel 
in the Rue Guillaume Tell. He receives in his 
vast atelier, filled with canvases, sketches, 
curious souvenirs of his travels, the statues 
and studies of Madame Besnard swathed in 
linen. The other rooms of the house are 
curious and personal. He never hesitates to 
use anything as a decoration, no matter how 
eccentric, provided it gives him the joys of 
form and color. The fire-place of his salon 
has for fender great serpents of enameled 
pottery, interlaced; and he uses as centre- 
piece for his dining table the charming torso 
of an antique Venus, kneeling, without head 
and without arms, which delights the eyes of 
his convives. He has a delightful country place 
on the lake of Annecy. I do not always enjoy 
some of Besnard's eccentricities in painting, 
and anyone who is an experimenter must 
sometimes end in eccentricity. But his best 
things, such as his Salon exhibit of last year, 
liis decorative panels and the "Flamenco," are 
some of the most beautiful things of the art of 
the nineteenth century; they reveal such imag- 



THE STUDIOS. 245 

ination, such science of the harmonies of form, 
such exquisite and personal harmonies of color. 
Besnard is one of the most remarkable instan- 
taneous draughtsmen I know of. The great 
passion of this colorist, who once said to me: 
"1 always exasperate one side of nature," is 
Ingres. He is a fervent disciple of Emerson, 
and quotes Emerson's saying: "Whoso 
would be a man must be non-conform- 
ist." Of living painters he has been more in- 
fluenced by Degas than anyone else, who was 
also the master of Forain. 

Speaking of Degas, one of the best impres- 
sionists who ever painted the figure, it is rare 
that anyone sees him nowadays. He seldom 
admits a visitor to his studio. He is sus- 
picious both of painters and visitors who are 
not painters. He looks down on the Salon 
and never exposes there, and you can hardly 
see his work elsewhere in Paris than at Du- 
rand-Ruel's or in the Luxembourg, which in- 
herited a few of his pictures three years ago, 
among others a dance at the Opera. In spite 
of his age Degas still looks young and he is 
an admirable and witty conversationalist. It 
was he who defined Gustave Moreau at the 
time of his election to the Academy as "A 
monsieur who paints the gods with watch 
chains." 

One of the most beautiful houses, a charm- 
ing hotel in the Rue de Bassano, almost at 



246 PARIS AS IT IS. 

the corner of the Champs Elysees, belongs to 
M. Bonnat. An imposing staircase leads to the 
studio on the third floor. On the last landing 
is a fine Puvis de Chavannes, *'Doux 
Pays," and the studio itself, which you reach 
through two little salons, is always filled with 
finished and unfinished portraits of celebrities 
of all sorts and millionaires. The master, a 
short, robust man, with moustache and a 
pointed beard, receives with great courtesy, 
but without vain words. He does not insist 
upon your admiring his own pictures, but he 
delights in showing his collection of other 
masters; a group by Ingres, a sketch in san- 
guine by Raphael, a sepia by Michael Angelo, 
two Botticellis, a Delacroix, a Prud'hon. The 
entire hotel is hung with chef-d'oeuvres. 

M. Bonnat is a bachelor. His old mother, to 
whom he was tenderly devoted, always lived 
with him until a few years ago. He has the 
reputation of being a charming man. One of 
his glories is to have received in his shirt 
sleeves one summer day the Tzar Alex- 
ander HI. 

One of the simplest and the most beloved 
of the Paris painters is the president of the 
Salon of the Champs Elysees, Jean Paul 
Laurens. He has always been a histor- 
ical painter, and his best work is "The 
Death of St. Genevieve," in the Pan- 
theon, He is a very interesting example 



THE STUDIOS. 247 

of a self-made man. A peasant's son, when he 
was fifteen he joined a strolling theatre troupe 
as a painter of scenery, and in this way trav- 
eled all over France. At Toulouse the direc- 
tor of the ficole des Beaux Arts noticed him 
and offered him work. Later he married the 
director's daughter. His reputation came 
to him in 1878^ and by a simple chance. 
A deputy named Turquet wanted to 
make a reputation in the Chambre as 
a protector of art, and Laurens's picture, 
"The General Staff of Austria Marching Be- 
fore the Body of Marceau," had just been 
noticed at the Exposition; Turquet bought it 
for 40,000 francs, and made a successful hit. 
Not long after he was appointed Secretary of 
the Beaux Arts. 

Laurens is a tall, thin, roughly-hewn man, 
with clear and gentle eyes, which give him an 
expression of honesty and goodness. He is 
not an easy talker; he often has trouble in 
finding words, but when he has found 
them they are frequently eloquent in their 
simplicity. I remember one thing that 
was told me of him which is character- 
istic of the absolute honesty of the man: He 
was walking through the Salon with Bour- 
geois, the Minister, who had stopped before 
one of the painter's Napoleons, and was over- 
whelming him with fulsome compHments, to 
his great discomfiture. "Why, Monsieur le 



248 PARIS AS IT IS. 

Ministre," said Laurens, at last, ''the day that 
I am perfectly satisfied with a picture I shall 
stop. I shall never touch a brush again." 

How many pages it would be easy to fill 
with notes about the personalities of these 
masters of the present, who will so many of 
them soon be the masters of the past, but 
I can only add a few more about one who is 
one of the geniuses, Rodin. To know 
something of Rodin you must not see 
him in society, where he rarely talks, nor 
yet on his reception days, where he is a little 
ill at ease in his frock coat. You must have 
occasion to surprise him in the morning, as I 
have once or twice, at work among his patri- 
cians; rushing in an old blue robe de chambre 
from the studio where he is finishing the 
monument to Victor Hugo to the other 
where for twenty years he has been adding 
compHcated figures to his Dante gates. 

Then he will talk, and he may show you 
his collection of unfinished sketches and 
projects which more than anything else will 
give you an exact idea of his genius and its 
limitations. Some of these are pure marvels, 
like everything which Rodin has interpreted 
with his profound sensibility when it is some- 
thing that he has seen. Others, pure works 
of the imagination, are puerile and even ab- 
surd. You could not imagine anything more 
incongruous by the side of projects glowing 



THE STUDIOS. 249 

with genius than some of his sketches; water 
nymphs, childishly drawn, crossing their 
limbs at right angles, for instance, or some of 
the plans for the gigantic monument to 
''Work;" an immense staircase mounting 
in a spiral to the figure of an angel, 
with statues all the length of the stair- 
case, and still other statues in the pedestal to 
symbolize subterranean toil. Rodin cannot 
make a work of pure imagination. Anything 
he has ever seen he transfigures. It was 
because of this lack of imagination that he 
succeeded in rnaking only a vague sketch of 
Balzac. His only idea of him he got through 
conversations with his literary friends, each of 
whom gave him some trait of the great novel- 
ist. The result was a piece of sculpture of im- 
mense suggestiveness, but which was never 
anything but an unfinished sketch. 



The Louvre. 

There is never a season, scarcely a month, 
if you Hve in Paris, when some friend, or friend 
of a friend, passing through, will not come to 
you and say: "I do not want to go to the 
Louvre without you. You have lived here so 
many years, and are such a lover of beautiful 
things." 

For a long time I never resisted these 
seductive words, partly, I confess frankly, be- 
cause they flattered my vanity; partly out of 
a feeling of sympathy for anyone starting 
out to make acquaintance with this immense 
palace, crammed from top to bottom with 
treasures. I hardly know of a more appal- 
ling experience than first expeditions to a pic- 
ture gallery. The chef-d'oeuvres stare at you 
with their strangely familiar and yet unre- 
sponsive faces; the endless succession of 
changing forms and colors bewilders your 
brain; at last even your memory forsakes you 
under the efifort of leaping from period to pe- 
riod of the world's history without intermis- 
sion. Often, if people were quite frank, I 
am afraid they would confess, like me, to hav- 
ing been reduced at the end of their early 

250 



THE LOUVRE. 251 

visits to a point where their only idea was 
that of trying to keep their equihbrium on the 
highly-polished floors. The professional 
guides at so much an hour are no resource. 
They assume not only the duty of making 
you see everything, but feel responsible for 
your emotions before each picture. So for 
a long time I went to the Louvre with anyone 
who asked me. 

As this experience becomes greater, how- 
ever, I find that I become less and less ac- 
cessible to flattery or to pity. Very few peo- 
ple, I discover, really care much for any- 
thing you may have to say about the pictures, 
unless it be to compare this with their Baede- 
kers', and this generally causes me to be taken 
in flagrant delit of ignorance. One class of 
tourists is interested only, in ''doing" the gal- 
lery; on the principle of a family I once met, 
whose pride it was to have ''done" all Paris 
in three days. "My wife took the galleries, 
my daughter the churches and I the cafes," 
the husband said when he was asked how they 
had accomplished the feat. 

Others are animated by the sole ambition of 
testing their archaeological knowledge of the 
pictures. They are strong on the "new 
art criticism" and want to pick out the 
Raphaels that are Signorellis, and the Botti- 
cellis that are Guilio Romanos. Others want 
to tell the stories about the lost hand 



252 PARIS AS IT IS. 

attributed to the Venus of Mile, and about 
the window from which, according to 
the legend, Charles IX. shot upon the 
Huguenots at the massacre of St. Barthole- 
mew. In short, they invariably care for an 
infinity of things which do not interest me 
in the least and, on their side, are not inter- 
ested in the least in any of the things which 
I love. So I have ended by going alone to the 
gallery, except when I find those whom 
I know to be very near to me through a great 
sympathy of mind and heart, and then 
I show them my Louvre. It is only this 
sort of a visit that I propose making 
here. For the discussion of the books alone 
which have been written upon this great col- 
lection would take more than one human life- 
time. 

As a matter of fact, there is nothing in this 
vast palace transformed into a museum which 
leaves me indifferent when I stop before it. 
Everything in it is of interest, either from the 
perfection of its execution or the revelation it 
makes of past civilizations. But if, like me, 
you are a fervent visitor of museums, you end 
by making particularly intimate friends in 
them, which you go to see each time that you 
pass that way and have a moment to spare. 
They are friends which come to be Hke the 
best of those in reality, for you can always 
be sure that they will Hft you above the petti- 




General \'iew of the Louvre from the River. 




Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre. 



THE LOUVRE. 253 

nesses of the everyday world, and that you 
will leave them cheered and stimulated. 

None of the pictures with which I have this 
particular sort of intimacy are among those 
which stand at the very summit among the 
creations of men, and which we look at 
with wonder — mingled with a slight de- 
gree of fear. In the Salon Carre, when I 
have only a little time, I pass before the 
''Mona Lisa" of Leonardo and the "Entomb- 
ment of Christ" by Titian with a respect that 
is religious, but rapid, and go straight to a 
corner by the side of the door of the long gal- 
lery, where is that portrait of the young Eliza- 
beth of Austria, Queen of France, painted by 
Clouet in 1570, not long after her marriage, 
when she was sixteen years old. In her 
straight robe of satin and brocade, encrusted 
with jewels so minutely painted you would say 
they were real, her hair artistically rolled away 
from her temples and entwined with pearls, 
her glance seems to have an expression of 
melancholy and uneasiness as though she 
was turning over in her mind some little sor- 
row hidden in the bottom of her soul. The 
value of the work, no 'doubt, lies more in 
the perfect sincerity of the drawing than in 
the painting. This is thin and hard as people 
liked it in that day. The model, too, is far 
from being what might be called a beauty, 
with her nose a little too large, and her eyes 



254 PARIS AS IT IS. 

elongated like almonds. But, nevertheless, 
she pleases me, my princess! She holds me 
with the charm of her womanhood and 
the grace of the young wife who seems to for- 
get, alone before the artist, the rank indicated 
by her resplendent dress. Possibly she is 
thinking of some one of those little tristesses 
which are the lot of childish wives; some 
caress, perhaps, misunderstood by the master 
— a frown upon his brow — perhaps it is the 
memory of her mother and the home she has 
just left forever . . . Who knows? But 
this picture always means to me an ideal of 
youth; and I never stand before it without 
a little clutching at the heart such as you 
have when, in turning over a bundle of old 
letters, you come upon the yellowed photo- 
graph of a friend who died young, and much 
loved. 

I have, so to speak, an equal intimacy with 
the young boy by Prud'hon which is in the 
gallery of modern paintings on the right as 
you leave the long gallery. It would be hard, 
however, to imagine a picture more different 
from the Clouet. It is broadly painted, and 
the personage is evidently a plebeian, sim- 
ply clad in a brown redingote with black collet, 
such as was worn at the end of the Revolu- 
tion. As a matter of fact, two centuries and a 
half separate these two pictures, and nothing 
could be in greater contrast than the two 



THE LOUVRE. 255 

epochs in which this queen and this Httle 
bourgeois came into the world, and yet my 
imagination always associates them together. 
They must have been about the same 
age, sixteen; but while the first charms me by 
the simplicity and candor which she has kept 
in her royal splendor, the other delights me by 
his grand air of haughtiness and distinction. 
His head, with features as delicate as those of 
a young girl, is slightly thrown back; the 
glance with which he dominates the crowd is 
full of confidence in life and pride in his birth- 
right of manhood. It is that of one of those 
young lion-cubs of t4ie time between the fall of 
the Kingdom and the rise of the Empire, when 
orators of twenty moved people with their 
eloquence, and generals of twenty-five began 
to conquer Europe. 

Two other paintings are among the things 
in the Louvre which are my special friends. 
They also are of widely different characters, 
speaking of widely different times. One is a 
little landscape by Watteau, in the Salle la 
Caze, much less celebrated than most of 
the Watteaus. It represents a setting sun 
whose orange rays flame behind the tall trees 
of a park, and are reflected in the mirror of a 
great marble basin. Seated on the grass and 
talking gallantly is a company of young peo- 
ple richly dressed. The falling twihght softens 
the masses, and renders the silhouettes unde- 



256 PARIS AS IT IS. 

cided. Few things set me more to dreaming 
than the contrast between this brilHant and 
wanton little company — the fete galante — and 
the strange beauty and melancholy of the land- 
scape — the passing day — now "with yester- 
day's seven thousand years." 

The other picture, in the gallery of the 
ItaHan primitives, is the "Crowning of the 
Virgin," by Fra Angelico. It represents the 
Virgin crowned by Christ in Paradise in the 
midst of an assemblage of saints where the 
men are on the left and the women on the 
right. It is the first figures in this last group 
which seem to me so specially enchanting, 
so specially worthy of the subject. This is 
not only because of the infinite grace of these 
women in adoration, because of the radiance 
of happiness in their ecstatic faces, but also 
because of the exquisite purity and delicacy of 
the tones in which they are painted. This 
is one of the finest examples I know of of 
what an artist can produce under the empire 
of an unquestioning religious faith. It is hard 
for the most spiritual of the painters of to-day 
to raise themselves above a purely human 
ideal. But all those sublime abstractions 
— Divine justice, eternal felicity. Paradise — 
forever evoke for me the vision of these saints 
which the good brother of Fiesole, surnamed 
Angelico, painted in the peace of his cell; and 



THE LOUVRE. 257 

which the hazard of events has set down in 
the midst of all the movement of Paris. 

In the gallery of Renaissance sculpture at 
the end of the court I fancy no one will have 
any difficulty in understanding why I have 
come to have a real tenderness for the little 
girl in terra-cotta modeled by Houdon at the 
end of the last century. She is just of that 
charming age, seven or eight, when the fea- 
tures begin to be clearly defined in the 
rounded baby face. There is already a fore- 
shadowing of the woman in the life-like head, 
turned with so quick and supple a move- 
ment that it has creased dimples in the neck 
and the narrow shoulders. A name is in- 
scribed upon the pedestal, an unknown name, 
Jeanne Brougniart. So she really hved, this 
charming little creature! She probably grew 
up, was married, and it is possible that her 
great-grandchildren live still. Age must have 
changed her; she must have had the or- 
dinary sum of human sufifering and hu- 
man joy. All that is unknown, lost among 
all the histories of human existences suc- 
ceeding each other so incessantly. But nev- 
ertheless we know, and those after us will 
know for endless years to come, thanks 
to the passing fancy of an artist of genius, that 
in the beginning of this century there lived a 
little girl who was called Jeanne Brougniart, 



258 PARIS AS IT IS. 

and who was charming when she was seven 
years old. 

For very md?h the same reasons I am 
fond of a little personage who lived three 
or four thousand years ago, whom you 
will find, high as the half of my arm, on an 
isolated pedestal in one of the Egyptian rooms 
of the first floor. The unknown sculptor who 
fashioned in precious wood the perfect ele- 
gance of her form has graven at the bottom 
her name and her quality. She was called 
Toui, and she was a priestess. I know of her 
nothing except that in her youth her face was 
lovely and she knew it; for she took great 
care to frame it in an artistic arrangement of 
curls. But this is enough to bring her very 
near to me, this, and the thought that I see 
her there just as she walked formerly through 
the streets of Memphis or of Thebes, display- 
ing the grace of her figure in her supple robe, 
and delighting in the admiration of men. Since 
I have made her acquaintance ancient Egypt 
is to me no more a dead thing symbolized by 
a grinning and time-worn Sphynx, or by 
great stone Pyramids, filled with mummies. 
In an instant the scenes figured on these monu- 
ments rise before me with all the animation of 
life, and it seems to me as though the delicate 
jewels ranged in the vitrines near by had just 
left the faces and the hands they once decked. 
For this resurrection it has only been neces- 



THE LOUVRE. 259 

sary for an artist to reveal to me that woman 
had the same charms and th^ same amiable 
perversities in that distant civilization which 
she has to-day. 

Here my enumeration of the things I go to 
see most often in the Louvre ends. With num- 
berless others I have a friendly acquaintance, 
but, as is so often the case in the world out- 
side, if I am frank with myself, I must confess 
that it is an acquaintance which speaks more to 
the intellect than to the heart. Of such, for 
instance, is the little Gourzagne in bronze, by 
Sperandio, in one of the rooms in the de- 
partment of the Renaissance. Solidly planted 
on his great war-horse, he evokes in my im- 
agination all the amorous, traitorous and war- 
like Italy of the Machiavelli, the Cellini, and 
the Medicis. Of such, too, is a miniature, an 
evangel of the fifteenth century by Fouquet, 
where, in a delicious landscape, you see Saint 
Marguerite spinning among her sheep, while 
the Roman Governor Olibius stops his horse 
to contemplate her. Of these, too, is the 
driver of a Greek chariot, found in the exca- 
vations of Delphi, made long before the time 
of Phidias, and yet showing to a greater de- 
gree than has ever been attained by any 
other artist the qualities of the finest sculp- 
ture, delicacy in line and majesty in simplicity. 

I do not speak of the Rembrandts, the 
Rubens, the Van Dycks, the Velasquezes, the 



26o PARIS AS IT IS. 

Claude Lorrains, the Venus of Milo, the Vic- 
tory of Samothrace, of any of the things 
which are the glory of the Louvre and which 
are known by all the world; and I do not pre- 
tend that others who go to see these that I 
have made my special friends will take the 
same pleasure in them that I do, or for the 
same reasons. If they are quite sincere with 
themselves their sympathies will probably go 
elsewhere. For in order that a work of art 
may move us deeply, not only must the 
choice of the model or of the subject corre- 
spond to some secret inclination of ours, but 
also, by a mysterious rapport of sensibility, we 
must be capable of being moved before it by, 
some of the feeling the artist had at the mo- 
ment he got his inspiration. I have only tried 
to show why certain things a little overshad- 
owed by the celebrities appeal to me and to 
give a method for walking among the galleries 
which will always be a source of the most re- 
fined and delicate enjoyment of art. 




The Arc de Trioniphe. 




im . '. "9W. 



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/ 



■■feSj 



Bridge of Notre Dame. 



Notre Dame, 

I wonder if you have ever, like me, happened 
to know an old lady who had lived through a 
whole century without apparently having her 
vigor either of mind or body impaired by any 
of those shocks which come every now and 
then as premonitions of the long repose at the 
end. One I knew formerly lived in the mem- 
ory of her first fifty years. After those she 
gave up following the incessant evolution 
of manners and ideas; she kept almost entirely 
to her own room, surrounded by her familiar 
bibelots and her faded furniture; and she pre- 
served the fashion in dress of the time when 
she bade the world farewell. Her great-grand- 
children, already men, seemed to her almost 
strangers; they had ideas and a manner of 
looking at Hfe which she could not under- 
stand; and they no longer recalled to her in 
any way those whom she had loved, long 
dead, to whom she had given her first as well 
as her last tenderness. 

The sensation of deep melancholy which I 
always had before this ancient dame, clinging 
to her past like a dry bough to the bank of a 
swift-flowing stream, I feel every time that I 

261 



262 PARIS AS IT IS. 

stop before the old church of Notre Dame. 
Buttressed on that isle of the city against 
which breaks the current of the Seine, in the 
superb charm of her Gothic dress, she has re- 
mained for a thousand years an unequaled 
chef-d'oeuvre of art. But it is long since 
either the admiration or the respect of those 
who pass by has been worthy of her. Less 
and less does the world appreciate the mys- 
tic beauty of this flower of stone, whose tow- 
ers outlined against the heavens in the Mid- 
dle Ages signified to the poor people below 
the sublime consolations of Christianity — of 
Faith, Hope and Charity. 

Now, we see her only with our eyes; they, 
the men and women of other days, saw her 
with their souls! 

"Barbarous civilization has made of her only 
a bibelot in an etagere. It has circled her with 
an iron railing. On one side it has moved 
away her old houses the width of a street; on 
the other it has destroyed them. Before her 
triple portal it has put the desert of a great 
open place. It has done all this in the name 
of hygiene, in the name of symmetry, in the 
name of security against fire, in the name of 
an infinity of things which may make for the 
progress of civilization, but have nothing 
to do with respect for the beauty of an- 
cient monuments. Now, the great flying 
buttresses of stone bending in double rank 



NOTRE DAME. 263 

from the tapering roof of the choir to the edge 
of the aisles are outlined against the sky like 
the useless skeleton of a bird. In other days 
they met uneven rows of houses, peering 
from their huge roofs like timid women from 
their mantles, and massing themselves against 
the Cathedral as though imploring protection; 
and her arches folded them into her shelter 
like the hen which spreads her wings with all 
her force to gather in her brood. 

One church in Paris still keeps this adorable 
air of maternal protection. It is St. Severine, 
quite near Notre Dame, standing in a poor 
quarter where the homeless find lodging at 
one sou the night. This example still living, 
if I may use the expression, makes me feel 
quite sure that this maternal aspect was an es- 
sential characteristic of these old churches, 
and fortifies me against the arguments of cer- 
tain modern architects, positive individuals, 
who have tried to prove to me that scientific 
reasons dominated over ethical in Gothic 
architecture. Flying buttresses, they say, 
were imagined at a period of Gothic art when 
the nave had become so high in proportion to 
the delicacy of the columns within that it was 
necessary to support it from the outside. But, 
surely, this reason is only secondary. If the 
great geniuses who built the churches of the 
Middle Ages had not been sufficiently compe- 
tent to be able to put feeling above a pure 



264 PARIS AS IT IS. 

problem of resistance they could never have 
made such a symbol of Christianity as you 
find in Notre Dame if you study her under- 
standingly. 

As for the spoiling of her Parvis, I cannot 
imagine what could be said in justification of 
it. I am not sufficiently the enemy of the 
architects of to-day to believe it was any 
of them who counseled the municipality of 
Paris to change the entire effect of this beau- 
tiful church by replacing with an empty space 
what was once a tangled labyrinth of old 
houses. 

The Cathedral is still no doubt a marvel of 
harmony through her lines, of majesty through 
her form, of lightness through her details; but, 
nevertheless, the feeling that you have in look- 
ing at her facade from the end of a great Place 
must be of a much lower order, I am sure, 
from that when yoti saw it at a distance of 
only a few yards. Then, as you picked your 
way through the narrow streets, you came 
suddenly upon her portals, set with those 
figures with grave and touching faces, which 
the high relief made seem living in the stone. 
If you raised your eyes slightly you saw the 
ogivals receding in ascensions of saints and 
seraphim, while higher still were other fig- 
ures, and then columns, and open-work balus- 
trades, and then an immense flowering of gar- 
goyles and chimeras, congealed in the white 




One of the Gargoyles on Notre Dame. 




Entrance to Notre Darrie. 



NOTRE DAME. 265 

stone and mounting indefinitely to lose them- 
selves in the pale ether of the heavens. Tlien 
3'ou bowed your head, crushed by the terrible 
majesty of this temple, seen thus from below, 
and a great humility came into your soul. 
Close at hand the pitying Christ stretched out 
His hands in the midst of His cortege of Apos- 
tles; and you entered the church to pray. 

So it must have been in the Middle Ages, I 
feel as sure as though I had known the men 
and women of Paris of that day. The very 
principle upon which the Cathedral is built 
confirms this; the way in which the figures fill 
the entrance only to the top of the portals, 
and then all the means employed above to 
make the lines taper more and more, so as to 
give that effect of extreme height without 
heaviness which was sought for in everything 
built at that time, and can be felt with intensity 
only upon the threshold. Anyone who has 
been at Rouen, at Cologne, or who has simply 
raised his eyes just as he entered Notre Dame, 
will understand what I mean. 

I know, unfortunately, all the uselessness of 
protesting against a vandalism which is more 
the work of circumstances than of men. You 
could not remake a primitive Paris to serve as 
a casket for this most precious of churches. 
And even if some royal caprice should one 
day attempt it, where would be the eyes to 
see anything but a chef-d'oeuvre of art in what, 



266 PARIS AS IT IS. 

in the centuries of simple faith, was only the 
most worthy house which could be conceived 
of for God? 

She sits on her island, this beautiful old 
church, in the splendor of her robe of wrought 
stone, dominating the years that pass, the 
men that change, the life in such miraculous 
process of transformation by science. And the 
city grows immeasurably, and buildings suc- 
ceed to buildings all the length of her flanks, 
leaving before her gray mass the calm of her 
Place; as the river which divides noisily at 
the pier of a bridge leaves a little spot sleep- 
ing and protected on the other side, and 
then noisily rejoins its current. She, with one 
or two other churches, are all that is left in 
Paris of her time, as though to remind men 
that, with all their discoveries, they have not 
been able to advance by a single line that last 
step she marks in the history of the human 
mind — Christianity ! 



The Commerce of Art in Paris. 

From time immemorial people who have had 
money and taste, or who have wanted to give 
themselves the luxury of appearing to have 
either, have bought works of art. But specu- 
lation in works of art is something entirely 
modern, dating from about 1872. It is al- 
most unnecessary to say that it had its birth 
in Paris, when we remember that Paris is one 
of the greatest markets in Europe for the sale 
of objects of art, and the greatest market in the 
world for the sale of paintings. 

This is because of its Salon, or, rather, its 
Salons, since now there are two which have a 
unique reputation on account of the number 
of artists who expose in them and the very re- 
markable quality of their work. Salons are 
a necessity; for, in order to produce, an 
artist must feel that his work is going to be 
seen and bought. They are also a stimulus. 
The French Salons have existed for two hun- 
dred years; but speculation in pictures is 
something which came with the downfall of 
the Empire, and the establishment of the Re- 
public. 

This is one of the most curious consequences 
267 



268 PARIS AS IT IS. 

of the substitution of the Republican for tht 
Imperial regime in France. As soon as peo- 
ple began to have leisure to think about some- 
thing else besides war and the Commune, 
everybody who up to that time had been in 
opposition to the Government and in disfavor 
with the Emperor, was suddenly raised to the 
highest pinnacle of popularity. The official 
painters were thrown into discredit, and, nat- 
urally, others who had been systematically 
left in the background were proclaimed the 
only masters. Among these last were men 
who fifteen or twenty years before were re- 
fused at the Salon, Hke Rousseau, Millet, 
Ribot, Puvis de Chavannes, Courbet, and 
others; Hke Manet, whom the Emperor in 
person had laughed at, and had even de- 
clared shocking. The result was that almost 
from one day to another pictures which had 
been scarcely worth a few hundred francs 
found buyers at high prices. Business men 
could not fail to see in this an excellent op- 
portunity, and thus it was that great houses 
came to be created in Paris for the sale of 
pictures, such as those of Goupil, now Bous- 
sod-Valadon, Sedelmayer, Durand-Ruel, 
Bernheim, Detrimont. They soon had branch 
houses in other countries, and also rivals, and 
the business of art became one of immense 
importance. Speculation in art, in the begin- 
ning prudently confined to painters of the 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 269 

school of 1830 to 1840, soon extended to the 
old masters, and finally to new men coming 
up, in whom dealers or even simple capitalists 
looking for good investments, thought they 
saw coming celebrities. 

The rise of this new commerce, from a 
general point of view, had many advantages. 
It interested people in a large number of art- 
ists who up to then had been ignored or for- 
gotten; and it sharpened the critical sense of 
the public, so that it no longer considered the 
annual Salon as a sort of great picture-book, 
got up simply for its amusement. The Salons 
had then, as they have still, the great disad- 
vantage of often giving to artists without real 
talent a momentary and fictitious value, ad- 
mirably adapted for speculative purposes, 
while they ignored other men destined to take 
an important place in the evolution of art. 
Nevertheless, the birth of the commerce of 
art in Paris had a happy effect on art in gen- 
eral, through stimulating production, and 
leading artists through the prospect of for- 
tune as well as fame, to develop to the highest 
degree their talent in as many dififerent lines 
as possible. 

The immediate consequence of all this was 
that the Paris Salon, which had had a world- 
wide fame for more than two centuries, became 
not only the most important exhibition of art 
of each year, but the most important market 



270 PARIS AS IT IS. 

for the sale of works of art. In 1881 the 
State, upon whom up to that time the Salon 
had depended, recognized this psychologi- 
cal change which had come over it, and of 
its own accord gave over its organization to 
its members, who formed themselves into a 
society called the ''Societe des Artistes Fran- 
<;ais." Up to that time the State in protecting 
the Salon had done an extremely disinterested 
work, and one which cost it a great deal of 
money, but it nevertheless considered this in- 
dispensable in order to keep up the prestige 
of French art. The day that this same Salon 
became a paying institution, self-supporting, 
the State considered that it had played its 
role of Macsenas as long as was necessary, 
and allowed the Salon to become a private 
enterprise. Through a sort of conscientious 
scruple, however, the Chambers decided that 
every three years there should be an Expo- 
sition, organized by the State, which should 
contain all the best Salon exhibits of the three 
preceding years. This was held only once, in 
1883, and since then the law has never been ap- 
plied. The Societe des Artistes Fran^ais ob- 
jected that the official Exposition, following 
immediately after their own, was too formida- 
ble a rival. 

The conscientious scruples of the Govern- 
ment, however, were not without foundation. 
The Salon was then composed of all the 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 271 

French artists and a great many from other 
countries, organized into a society with almost 
the sole aim of holding a great annual ex- 
position for selling their works. There were 
constantly, as was inevitable, all sorts of dif- 
ferences and rivalries among its members, and 
these were always to the detriment of these 
artists-^-a minority, but fortunately a minority 
of importance — whose sole aim was art. At 
the end of 1889, under the pretext that the 
jury of the Exposition had depreciated the 
value of the medals they awarded in giving 
too many to foreign artists, a considerable 
group of painters and sculptors separated 
from the Societe des Artistes Franqais, with 
Meissonier at their head, and created a new 
Salon called La Societe Nationale des Beaux 
Arts. The two are popularly known as the 
Salon of the Champs Elysees and the Salon 
of the Champ de Mars, from the places where, 
up to the time of the Exposition of 1900, they 
held their exhibitions. 

They are now rival business houses, of 
which the first is the larger and the richer 
of the two, and the only one, moreover, which 
contains in its bosom the members of the In- 
stitute. The second is made up of artists who 
are in general more original than those of the 
first; and it is directed by men who are quick 
to carry out all the improvements or reforms 
demanded by the public. But by all ordinary 



272 PARIS AS IT IS. 

business methods both try to attract custom. 
Does the ''Champ de Mars" proclaim that it 
counts more creators (Rodin, Besnard, Puvis 
de Chavennes, Carriere, etc.)? the "Champs 
Elysees" repHes that it alone is in the real tra- 
dition of what is beautiful in art, since it 
has all the masters of the Institute and the 
Beaux Arts (Bouguereau, Gerome, Benjamin- 
Constant, Henner, Breton, etc.). The first 
opens a salle de repos with beautiful hangings, 
easy-chairs and a bufifet, and the other fol- 
lows its example. One walks in the foot- 
steps of the other even in the organization of 
a special section for works of art. The com- 
mercial element has so gained ground of late 
in the Champ de Mars that it is not at all 
unlikely that before very long there will be a 
third schism, with a third Salon. 

All these divisions and rivalries are a source 
of annoyance to the Government, whose duty 
it is to be impartial, and yet who cannot be 
because its preferences go naturally to the 
majority, and to the "Old Guard" of the 
Champs Elysees. The jury for the Exposi- 
tion of 1900 was made up, by the Minister 
of the Beaux Arts, of four elements: one- 
fourth from the Champ de Mars (Societe 
Nationale), one-fourth from the Champs Ely- 
sees (Societe des Artistes Fran^ais), one-fourth 
from the members of the Institute, one- 
fourth from the functionaries and art critics. 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 273 

The majority, you see, necessarily came from 
the Champs Elysees, as all the members of the 
Institute belong to that society. 

All this history is essential in order to un- 
derstand the development of the commerce of 
art in Paris, and its condition at the present 
time. Outside of a very few isolated painters, 
of whom I shall speak later, an artist, in order 
to sell in France, must be admitted to one or 
the other of these Salons and be exposed there 
in a good place. The Champs Elysees admits 
the most works, but it hangs them anywhere 
from the "line" to the ceiling, and it awards 
medals which place their receivers hors con- 
cours — which means that their pictures are ac- 
cepted without being passed upon by the jury. 
The ''hors concours" take all the best places 
in the Salon, and nearly all the places on the 
line. To get the other good places young 
painters must have the protection and the in- 
fluence of a member of the jury; and to have a 
medal they must be pupils either of him or of 
some other of the heads of the society. It is 
easy to see the result that this has upon 
art. To be accepted at the Salon is the young 
painter's principal stepping-stone towards sell- 
ing his pictures. To get a medal is to be hors 
concours, and that means the certainty of ex- 
posing every year in a good place, and, there- 
fore, of always having his works in the mar- 
ket, advantageously. So, he goes into the 



2 74 PARIS AS IT IS. 

studio of some one of the heads of the Champs 
Elysees (not all of whom have real value as 
artists), and more often than not sets himself 
to imitating as far as possible his master's 
manner; naturally the style his teacher most 
admires. This explains the immense prestige 
of the Julian School, where all the professors 
are heads of the Champs Elysees, and it also 
explains the generally uninteresting character 
of the Champs Elysees Salon. The excep- 
tional artist will also go to the Julian School; 
but the average in every school is mediocrity, 
and nearly every Julian student of good and 
regular standing on principle is passed in his 
examinations; that is to say, is admitted to 
the Salon. So we see a great many mediocre 
artists in the Champs Elysee Salon, and an 
artificial and temporary value is given them 
in numberless cases simply because they are 
in the Salon. The painters, then, too, stand 
by each other. Mediocrity makes the law. 

In the Champ de Mars the hors concoiirs has 
the title of associe or societaire. Each one of the 
societaires has the right to expose ten works 
without examination by a jury; each of the as- 
socies the right to one under the same condi- 
tions, and the last generally have three or four 
taken outside of these. Only some two hun- 
dred places are left for newcomers, and those 
not the best. The Champ de Mars also is 
already beginning to be affected by the same 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 275 

commercial elements which have influenced 
the Champs Elysees. So we see that the 
two Salons which put the hall-mark on art, 
and established criterions of art, are formed 
not upon artistic, but upon business princi- 
ples. For all sorts of reasons men are often 
pushed forward who have only a fictitious 
artistic value, and others are protected who 
have almost no artistic value at all. Foreign- 
ers then get with difficulty a correct idea of 
the actual state of French art, of the real posi- 
tion of the different French artists, and the 
actual money value of their works? Tolstoi, in 
a work on the beaux-arts, tells how falsely his 
opinions of art in France were formed from 
reading the art criticisms in the French news- 
papers — nearly all pure advertisements — and 
a visit to one exhibition of French pictures, or- 
ganized by a picture dealer of Moscow. 

We in America, outside of those of us who 
are able to see the Salons every year, are 
even worse off than the Russians; for while 
we read fewer French critics, distance makes 
us more dependent upon the dealers, who now 
furnish our public almost its only opportunity 
of seeing foreign pictures, and who, being 
business men naturally, select everything with 
a single eye to business. All picture-selling 
now has come to be as much organized specu- 
lation as any other sort of operations in stock. 
What is the point of view of the picture- 



276 PARIS AS IT IS. 

dealer? That of every other business man, 
whose aim is to sell very dear what he has 
bought dear, and dear what he has bought 
cheap. 

In the first instance, when the dealer wants 
to sell for an enormous price what cost him a 
great deal, what he imports and what he puts 
in fashion are the pictures of some painter 
a la mode, in whose works he has made a 
'"corner" by buying up all of them. When 
the man is dead the operation is excellent. 
A great deal of speculation of this sort has 
been done in the ancient masters. One house 
that I call to mind has been operating espe- 
cially in Rembrandts, but the supply is ex- 
hausted, and it is putting the other Dutch 
masters in fashion. A great deal has been 
done with the 1830 painters, like Rousseau, 
Dupre and Corot. This source also is pretty 
well exhausted (though a large number of 
false Corots have been put in). I have no- 
ticed lately, however, that a particular dealer 
was preparing a future "corner" in Corots 
by buying up all that are left, of which but 
few are the best. In these cases the market 
is generally "bulled" for them all, good or bad. 
The painters of the end of the Empire, such 
as Millet and Bouguereau, have been forced 
up to fabulous prices. Bouguereau has de- 
clined greatly. 

In th^ second sort of operation what the 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 277 

dealer brings over and exploits are the pic- 
tures of some painter that he has put arti- 
ficially a la mode or of one to whose works he 
has given an artificial value by forcing them 
up to an exaggerated price at some celebrated 
sale. Putting an artist artificially in fashion is 
especially practiced with portrait painters. 
The dealer chooses an artist who has made 
himself a little talked of in Paris, through be- 
ing a prix de Rome, or having made the por- 
trait of a king or pope, or of Sarah Bern- 
hardt, which has been a sensational feature of 
the Champs Elysees Salon, who has been writ- 
ten about, which is an equivalent to a good 
advertisement in the American papers, and 
signs with him a contract to go to the United 
States and make so many portraits at so much 
a head. I know of some cases of portrait 
painters where the dealer got half the price. It 
generally happens that either these artists are 
men who have no reputation in the artistic 
world abroad, like Chartran, or they are men 
who have a great reputation, like Benjamin- 
Constant, but foi" certain zvorks. In the case 
of a good artist like Benjamin-Constant, the 
people in Paris who are jealous for the repu- 
tation of French art will tell you, as they have 
told me: "He can make a fine portrait if he 
tries. But you must not judge of him by 
those he paints simply to make money." As 
it is, all of the portraits that Ihave seen lately 



278 PARIS AS IT IS. 

by Benjamin-Constant have been painted sim- 
ply to make money. A constant habit of 
working rapidly has made him almost in- 
variably replace painting by clever effects of 
finish, dissimulate in shadow the hands which 
it takes too long to draw carefully, and to 
make conventional backgrounds such as you 
see in photographs. 

A great portrait, for that matter, like any 
great work of art, can only come from the 
impulse of inspiration; and no one can have 
two or three inspirations a month in the 
midst of all the distractions of travel, and 
before the faces of personages entirely un- 
known, of whose personaHty and character 
he has no idea. Rembrandt would never have 
done that sort of thing. He preferred to keep 
on copying himself. 

As to picture sales and the fictitious value 
given by them to pictures, I have seen many 
amusing examples. For instance, I remem- 
ber going some three years ago to a little ex- 
hibition at the Hotel Drouot of the works 
of Jongkind, who had recently died. A very 
good small-sized Jongkind could then be 
bought for about $60, as there was but 
little sale for his pictures. The entire collec- 
tion was bought in by the representative of a 
syndicate of picture-dealers made up of the 
leading houses in five cities, including New 
York and Boston. The syndicate then pro- 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 279 

ceeded to put the Jongkinds on the market 
in this way: At the first great sale one was 
put in and the price run up by the syndicate 
to a certain point. When it had gone consid- 
erably above the original value of the work, 
bidding stopped, and the picture was knocked 
down to the dealers, who divided the loss. 
This operation was repeated at successive 
sales, until finally an outsider stepped in and 
bought a Jongkind for something like $600. 
The syndicate then divided the profit, and as 
it owned all the painter's works, could make 
an extremely good thing out of them. The 
dealers did the same thing lately for the im- 
pressionist, Sisley, who lived and died in pov- 
erty. They had bought up a monopoly of 
his works, and upon his death they organ- 
ized a sale for the benefit of his children, 
and asked his colleagues of the Champ de 
Mars each to contribute a picture. Most of 
them did, to find that the sale was intended 
simply as a means for exploiting the Sisleys 
and depreciating the other painters, who were 
sold for prices that were absurd. The pub- 
lished prices of these sales largely set the 
prices for pictures. In this way dealers suc- 
ceed in depreciating the reputation of the men 
they do not own, and making the painters 
more and more dependent on them. 

For various reasons speculators had a last 
gold mine in the impressionist painters. Cer- 



28o PARIS AS IT IS, 

tain dealers, believing in the future of these 
chercheiirSy bought up a large number of their 
pictures at a time when they were poor and 
luiknown; or they got artists to make engage- 
ments with them on long contracts to give 
them a monopoly of their work (Monet and 
Degas), or they depreciated their work while 
they were living to buy it up in a lot after 
their death (Sisley). They were mistaken in 
their idea that impressionist painting was 
going to replace every other; but neverthe- 
less, as it is an important contribution to the 
evolution of art, the impressionist pictu**es 
they have in their galleries have a real value, 
especially those painted between 1885 and 
1887. They do not all, however, possess the 
value attributed to them.. The last Monets 
and the last Sisleys have been very inferior. 
Monet and Degas live apart, outside of the 
movement of art and the world, and are little 
influenced by commercial considerations. But 
few men can keep up to their best standard 
when their work is, as it were, mortgaged 
beforehand. 

Most of these resources for making great 
sums rapidly are beginning to be exhausted, 
and therefore the latest source for speculators 
is selling imitation old masters. A droll cari- 
cature of Forain's some time ago in one of 
the French newspapers was a hit at this. A 
painter, in a room representing the last de- 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 281 

gree of destitution, the wife ill, the children 
ragged and emaciated, is working feverishly 
at an easel. A dealer in a fur-lined coat stands 
by, saying: **You know I must have three 
Corots, two Ribots and a Diaz before the 
15th." Just at present imitation Dutch mas- 
ters are specially put on the market; Dutch 
masters are particularly fashionable. I know 
of a young American painter outside of Paris 
who is making an excellent living, after much 
struggling, out of works of art of this de- 
scription. 

One resource still remains, and long will 
remain to the speculator. That is, to organ- 
ize little exhibitions of pictures of some out- 
side men and attract public attention to them. 
Sometimes these are good, oftener poor, for 
with the eclecticism existing everywhere now 
in France, most of the good men expose in 
the Salon. Another, very commonly prac- 
tised, is to lie in wait for the new men in the 
Salons who are beginning to be appreciated 
by the public, and persuade them, through the 
prospect of a regular income for their fami- 
lies, to article themselves out, as it were, to 
the dealer, and furnish him all their works, at 
so much a head, for a fixed term of vears. 
This is perfectly legitimate, but the dealer, 
having a monopoly of this painter's pictures, 
runs them up to an artificial value, after put- 
ting them in fashion. 



2&Z PARIS AS IT IS. 

I have been amused to see the degree to 
which fashion ruled artistic taste. I saw an 
instance of it not long ago with the Norwe- 
gian painter, Thaulow. Thaulow was then 
living in Dieppe, and I was visiting his fam- 
ily. As he was away from Paris and the art 
movement, he had arranged to give his pic- 
tures on contract to a dealer for a term of 
years — now nearly ended. Thaulow had then 
a European reputation, and his studio was full 
of lovely things. A Thaulow was then worth 
about $400, and it was certainly the time to 
buy, before prices went up. I spoke of this 
to several American friends interested in pic- 
ture buying, but it fell upon the most stony 
indifference. Thaulow was not in fashion. 
One of these same persons bought later of a 
dealer in New York one of these Thaulows, 
which in a very short time had been pushed 
up to $900. I take this instance because a 
Thaulow is really worth $900, but suppose it 
were not? The operation might be the same. 
This sort of thing, too, reacts with foreigners 
upon other painters whose works rise slowly 
simply through their permanent and real artis- 
tic value. 

Nevertheless, it must not be forgotten that 
the dealer takes great risks hke the publisher; 
and on the whole, as I said in the beginning, 
the rise of the commerce of art has been a 
great gain to art, as the rise of an exchange 



THE COMMERCE OF ART IN PARIS. 283 

for the manipulating of stocks has been a 
great gain to our country in stimulating the 
creating of railroads, and the developing of 
new territory. The difference between the 
two, however, is that one is trankly recog- 
nized as a business, conducted on purely 
business principles; the other is not. The 
picture-dealer, a business man, whose art in- 
stincts, if he has any, are necessarily stifled 
by his commercial instincts, is allowed to 
create the popular taste for art, and then to 
exploit it as he wills. His judgments on not 
only modern but ancient pictures are taken 
by a great majority of the picture-buying 
public as authorities. 

For Europe, America is now the great art- 
market of the world; and it is the great field 
for art speculation because distance and a 
lack of understanding of the conditions on 
the other side make us less able to judge of 
the real value of the foreign art products 
which are brought to us, since we have no 
means of forming our own judgments upon 
them through a broad standard of compari- 
son. 

Other countries have passed through this. 
They now protect themselves against it, as 
in Russia, by organizing exhibitions entirely 
outside of the dealers. In Russia the royal 
family replaces the State, and gives to art 
the protection that the Government gave to 



284 PARIS AS IT IS. 

France in the early days. The last exhibition 
was under the direct patronage of the Em- 
peror's aunt, the Grand Duchess of Olden- 
burgh. The French Government sent the 
director of the Beaux Arts, M. Ronjon, to 
this, and the Grand Duchess invited M. An- 
dre Saglis, one of the young attaches of the 
Beaux Arts, who has showed the most initia- 
tive in propagating a knowledge of the best 
French art abroad, to come on at her expense 
and give practical suggestions for this ex- 
hibition. We do not want a royal family, and 
our Government could never play the role 
that the State did in France, where the coun- 
try and the constitution and the arts have 
developed simultaneously during several 
hundred years. Our wealthy and public- 
spirited citizens are beginning to replace both 
these. But could not we also have exhibi- 
tions of pictures organized outside of com- 
mercial conditions? 



Index. 



Academic, the, Frangaise, pp. 14-34; women continue tra- 
ditions of, p. 15; foundation of, p. 16; social aspect of, 
pp. 17-25; of no real use, p. z^- 

Academic des Inscriptions, et Belles Lettres, p. 30. 

Academic des Sciences, p. 30. 

"Administration," the goddess of France, p. 173; everything 

in France regulated by, p. 175; why it survives, p. 177. 
Ambassadeurs, the restaurant, p. 121. 
Anglais, the cafe, pp. 116, 119. 

Armor, collections of, at Musee d'Artillerie, p. 212. 
Art, the commerce of, in Paris, pp. 267-284. 
Art, the, of Paris, compared to contemporary literature, p. 84. 
Arts, Pont des, p. 4. 

Beaux Arts, Academic des, pp. 32-34; influence of harmful 
to Paris, p. z^. 

Besnard, M., pp. 241-244. 

Bohemia at home, p. 77. 

Bon Marche, the, founded by Boucicaut, p. 130; described, 
p. 132; a custom introduced by, p. 133. 

Bourgeoisie, the, typical life of France, p. 58, 

Bourget, M. Paul, pp. 92-94. 

Carnavalet, Musee, p. 211. 

Cazin, M., pp. 241-243. 

Ceramics, Chinese, collection of, at Louvre, p. 208. 

Ceard, M. Henry, mention of, pp. 89, 90. 

Cernuski, the Musee, p. 208; Oriental art of, p. 212. 

Champs Elysees, salon of the, p. 271 ; members of Institute 
identified with, p. 271 ; Jean Paul Laurens, president of, 
p. 246. 

Champ de Mars, salon of, p. 271 ; Monet identified with, 
P- 234. 

Chavannes, Puvis de, pp. 229, 230. 

Claretie, M. Jules, director of Comedie Frangaise, p. 35. 

City, Isle of the, pp. 4, 73. 

Cluny, the Museum of, pp. 191-204; little chapel of, p. 194; 
"chambre de la Reign Blanche," at, p. 197; treasures of, 
pp. 198, 199; sallc devoted to objects pertaining to Jew 
ish religion, p. 209. 

Comedie, the, Frangaise, pp. 35-54; styled House of Moliere, 
p. 37; actual government of, p. 41 ; storerooms of, p. 43; 
leading actors of, pp. 48-51; Louis XIV. actual founder 
of, p. 38; to it Paris owes much, p. 40; publi: expen- 
diture for, a national benefit, p. 41 ; why holds its own, 
p. 48. 

285 



286 • INDEX. 

Concorde, Place de la, p. 9. 

Coppee, M. Frangois, p. 99. 

Corot, "father of French impressionists," p. 2t,2,- 

Cottel, M., pp. 235, 236. 

Degas, M., p. 245. 

Dauchez, M. Andre, p. 241. 

Deputies, the Chamber of, pp. 141-157; called a "Congress 
of Ambassadors," p. 149; its members, p. 153; function- 
aries of, numerous, p. 183. 

Donnay, M. Maurice, p. 98. 

Doree, the Maison, p. 116. 

Durand, the restaurant, p. 120. 

Duval, the restaurants, p. 119. 

Elysee, the, pp. 158-172; an anomaly, p. 161; description of, 
p. 162; viewed from Faubourg St. Honore, p. 163; inside 
life of, pp. 164, 165; effacement of ladies at, p. 168; ball 
at, pp. 170, 171. 

Fetes of Paris, pp. 10, 11. 

Foyot, the restaurant, p. 121. 

France, M. Anatole, p. 103. 

France, too long ruled by kings, p. 161. 

Frederic, the cafe, pp. 122, 123. 

French, the, tendencies of, p. 68. 

Goncourt, the Academy, pp. 91, 92. 

Grand, the Cafe, p. 112. 

Guimet, the Musee, p. 206. 

Gyp, Mme. de Martel-Janville, pp. 96, 97. 

"Halite bourgeoisie," home life of, in Paris, described, pp. 

60-63. 
Hervieu, M. Paul, p. 90. 

Home, the French, characteristics of, pp. 55, 56, 65-157. 
Huysmans, M. Joris Carl, pp. 90, 105. 
Impressionists, the French, pp. 233-246. 

Institute, members of identified with the Salon Champs 
Elysees, p. 271. 

Invalides, Les, pp. 214-218; Napoleon's remains deposited in, 
p. 215; Mtiseum of Artillery in, 217. 

Joseph, the restaurant, p. 122. 

Laurens, Jean Paul, pp. 231-246; president of Salon Champ 

de Mars, p. 247. 
Lavedan, M. Henri, p. 97. 

Legislation, an epitome of French, pp. 146-148. 
Lepage, M. Bastien, p. 232. 
Letters, the men of, pp. 83-108. 
Lilas, la Closerie des, p. 79. 

Literary, the, situation in Paris, reviev/ed, pp. 85-108. 
Lorrain, M. Claude, pp. 212-22,1)1,. 
Lovivre, the, pp. 250-260; some pictures noted, pp. 253-256; 

gallery of sculpture, p. 257; Egyptian rooms of, p. 258. 



INDEX, 287 

Louvre, the, a great shop of Paris, p. 131 ; founded by 

Chauchard, p. 130. 
Luxembourg, Museum of, p. 209; indispensable sequel to 

Louvre, p. 211. 
Madrid and Arme-Nouville, the restaurant, p. 121. 
Mardi-Gras, Moliere afternoons of, p. 36. 
Marguery, the restaurant, p. 121. 
Masters, the old Dutch, p. 233. 
Maupassant, M. Guy de, p. 89. 
Medan, soirees, de, p. 88. 

Menard, M. Rene, p. z^t, member of Barbizon school, p. 238. 
Ministries, in the, pp. 173-1S8. 
Mode, the, in Paris, pp. 219-228; Napoleon paid tribute to, 

p. 222)\ sociological evolution of, p. 225; theatres of Paris, 

a salon for, p. 226. 
Monet, M., pp. 233, 234. 
Moreau, the Musee Gustave, p. 208. 
Morissot, Berthe, p. 22,2,- 
Musee d'Artillerie, p. 212. 
Musee des Gobelins, p. 212. 
Museums of Paris, pp. 205-213. 
Musee de la Ville de Paris, p. 211. 
Naturalist movement, the, pp. 87-90. 
Noel and Peters, the restaurant, p. 121. 
Notre Dame, Cathedral of, pp. 261-266. 
Oppert, stories of, p. 29. 

Oriental Art, at the Louvre, at Musee Cernuski, p. 212. 
Paillard, the cafe, p. 121. 
Palissy, potteries of, at Cluny, p. 202. 
Paris, natural beauty of, pp. 3-6; secret charm of, pp. 8, 9; 

why different from other cities, p. 7; traditions of, p. 11; 

first theatre of, p. ^iT^ other theatres of, p. 49; Cafe de, 

p. iii; great shops of, pp. 128-137. 
Passy, Pont de, p. 4. 

Phares de la Bastille, a great shop of Paris, p. 131. 
Place Clichy, a great shop of Paris, p. 131. 
Poetry, French symbolic, p. 104. 
Politics, French, discussed, pp. 154-157. 
Potteries, at Musee des Religions, at Cluny, p. 212. 
President of France, the, representative of the people, p. 159; 

never popular, p. 160; daily life of, p. 167. 
Prevost, M. Marcel, pp. 94, 95. 
Public Instruction, visit to Ministry of, p. 186. 
Public opinion, not intelligent in France, p. 184. 
Prix de Rome, p. Z2>. 
Quarter, the Latin, discussed, pp. 72-82; changes in, p. 75; 

stories of, pp. 81, 82. 
Rodin, M., pp. 249, 250. 



2^B INDEX. 

Religions, Mus^e des, p. 206. 

Renaissance, department art of, at Louvre, p. 209. 

Restaurants, the famous, of Paris, pp. 109-127; some famous 

dinners at, p. 125. 
Rosny, J.-H., the brothers, p. 107. 
Rostand, M., Edmond, p. 105. 
Sacre Coeur, church of, p. 5. 
Salon of the Champs Elysees, p. 271, 
Salon of the Champ de Mars, p. 271. 
Salons of Paris, formed upon business rather than artistic 

principles, p. 275; criticism upon management of, pp. 

269-274. 
Samaritaine, the, a great shop of Paris, p. 131. 
Shops, the great, of Paris, discussed, pp. 128-138; ethical 

influence of, p. 137. 
Simon, M., artist of Barbizon school, pp. 239, 240. 
Societe des Artistes Frangaise organized 1881, p. 270; group 

of sculptors and painters separated from, p. 271. 
Soldat Laboreur, a great shop of Paris, p. 131. 
Sous-prefet, problem of the, pp. 145, 146. 
Speculation in art, in Paris, p. 268; confined at first to 

school of 1830-40, p. 269; influence of on Salons, p. 269; 

criticism of methods of conducting exhibitions, p. 273. 
St. Severine, church of, p. 263. 
Studios, the, of Paris, pp. 229-249. 
Tapestries at Musee des Gobelins, p. 212. 
Tapis Rouge, the, a great shop of Paris, p. 131. 
"The Friday Dinner," p. 126. 
Tour d'Argent, the, p. 124. 
Tournelle, Pont de la, p. 4. 
Tout-Paris, defined, p. 56. 
Twelfth Night, celebrated in Paris, p. 11. 
Versailles, art treasures of, p. 211. 
Voisin, the Cafe, p. 116. 
Zola, M. Emile, p. 87, 



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